Crime Magazine - J. Patrick O'Connorhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor
J. Patrick O'Connor is the editor of Crime Magazine. He graduated from the University of Missouri in Columbia in 1967. He was a reporter and bureau manager for United Press International, editor of Cincinnati Magazine and an associate editor for TV Guide. He was editor and publisher of the Kansas City New Times, an alternative newspaper. Click here to read an interview with him on bookhitch.com. He is the author of The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, which was published by Lawrence Hill Books in May of 2008. His book Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper was published by Strategic Media Books in 2012. Both books are available for purchase at amazon.com, barnesandnobel.com and bookstores throughout the United States. Scapegoat won the Silver medal in the 2013 Independent Publisher Book Awards and Bronze in ForeWord Reviews' Book of the Year Award competition for True Crime books. To see an interview Prison Radio conducted with Pat O'Connor about the book, please go to http://www.youtube.com. Click here to contact him by e-mail.
enBook 'Em - Vol. 43http://www.crimemagazine.com/book-em-vol-43
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p class="MsoNormal"><strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/0374277893" rel="nofollow"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://www.crimemagazine.com/sites/default/files/Breivick.jpg" alt="" height="300" /></a></span></strong></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Crime Magazine's Choice of True Crime Books <br /></span></strong></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="line-height: 115%; font-size: large;">by <a href="http://www.crimemagazine.com/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor">J. Patrick O'Connor </a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/0374277893" rel="nofollow">One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway</a></span></em><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> by Asne Seierstad (Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux, 2015, 530 pages). To Norwegians, the most incomprehensible thing about the mass murder in Oslo and at the nearby island of Utoya was that the murderer was not some foreign jihadist but a home grown terrorist from an affluent Oslo neighborhood. On July 22, 2011, 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in central Oslo, killing eight people. Then, dressed as a police officer, he made his way to the isolated youth camp on the island of Utoya where in the course of one hour he methodically shot to death 69 more, most of them teenage members of Norway's governing Labour Party. The massacre set off the greatest national trauma since the Nazi invasion and occupation during World War II. In <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">One of Us</em>, award winning war correspondent Asne Seierstad describes not only the massacre itself in copious detail but how Breivik's life goal morphed from new-Nazi musings to wanting to rid Europe of every Muslim and end the continent's slide into multiculturalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Somehow, as Breivik descended into fanaticism as his plans took shape to start the war on multiculturalism, no one seemed to notice. <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">One of Us</em> also carefully reconstructs the lives of several of Breivik's young victims. Following a trial that allowed Breivik to act as his own counsel and to rant against the state, he was convicted on August 24, 2012 and sentenced to the maximum penalty the law allowed: 21 years. However, as long as he is viewed as a threat to society, the sentence could be extended by five years every five years "until death claimed him," Seierstad writes. </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/1606351974" rel="nofollow"><em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41WPIHA22qL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="84" />Bloody Lies: A CSI Scandal in the Heartland</span></em></a><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> by John Ferak (Black Squirrel Books, an imprint of The Kent State University Press, 2014, paperback 243 pages). The shotgun murders of Wayne Stock and his wife Sharmon on Easter Sunday night in 2006 at their farmhouse in a remote section of Cass County, Nebraska were senseless acts of depravity. In addition to ammunition shells from a .12 gauge shotgun, a flashlight, and a marijuana pipe were left in plain sight on the Stocks' gravel driveway near the front door. The investigation soon focused on two young nephews of the murdered Stocks. One of them, under extreme duress from intense police questioning, confessed and implicated his cousin. When he recanted the next day, an Omaha Crime Lab that had already spent over eight hours unsuccessfully looking for blood traces in the alleged getaway car now miraculously found a blood trace with the DNA of Wayne Stock. The case against the two young men was all of sudden iron-clad. Or was it just another case of a crime lab stepping over the line to nudge a case along? When investigators began following another crime-scene clue -- the DNA laden marijuana pipe -- the case veered radically away from the nephews and eventually to the actual killers, two Wisconsin teenager who picked the Stock farmhouse at random to burglarize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once the killers were sentenced to life without parole, the question that took center stage was how did the blood trace get in the getaway car that had never been a getaway car. </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/0345813766" rel="nofollow"><em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51gi1YDp%2BML._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="83" />Business or Blood: Mafia Boss Vito Rizzuto's Last War</span></em></a><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> by Peter Edwards and Antonio Nicaso (Random House Canada, 2015, hardback, 313 pages). A well-researched, well-written account of the last years of Vito Rizzuto's storied life of crime. For years, Rizzuto was the unchallenged leader of the Canadian Mafia, operating out of the Port of Montreal, the northern gateway to the major American drug markets. Extradited and put on trial in 2006 for his role in a decades-old Brooklyn triple murder, Rizzuto spent the next six years in federal prison as a rival gang -- the Calabrian Mafia -- decimated his family, killing his father and son as well as many of his lieutenants and friends. When he was released from prison in 2012, the 66-year-old don emerged with one thing on his mind: vengeance. </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/022624895X" rel="nofollow"><em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51zGzdzQB-L._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="83" />Blood Runs Green: The Murder that Transfixed Gilded Age</span></em></a><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chicago</em> by Gillian O'Brien (The University of Chicago Press, 2015, hardback, 303 pages).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The murder of Dr. P.H. Cronin, a respected Irish physician whose naked, beaten body was found in a Chicago sewer in 1889, set off a media storm that exposed a web of intrigue, secrecy, and corruption within the secret Irish societies of the day. The murder made headlines across the United States to England and Ireland. What caused Cronin's murder to attract the biggest funeral procession Chicago had seen since Lincoln's body lain in state at the Cook County Courthouse in 1865, makes a fascinating story of Irish politics at the turn of the 20th century. O'Brien's research and writing are first-class, bringing to life how Chicago replaced New York and Boston as the center of Irish influence in trying to turn British-controlled Ireland into the republic it became in 1922.</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/0882824848" rel="nofollow"><em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51ernGFqwfL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="83" />Accused: A Heartbreaking Death and the Quest for Justice</span></em></a><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> by Brittany Ducker (New Horizon Press, 2015, hardback, 305 pages). The brutal murder of 14-year-old Trey Zwicker in Louisville in 2011 resulted in his stepfather, an ex-con with a pronounced violent streak, and his stepbrother, a 15-year-old honor student, being tried separately for the murder. The author, a Louisville-based defense attorney, goes step by step through this bizarre case, explaining the pathology behind the senseless murder and showing once again how often law enforcement can get it so wrong. For readers interested in the inner-workings of a capital trial, <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Accused </em>is an informative look inside. </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/1561637629" rel="nofollow"><em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51OjBuawFaL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="84" />Madison Square Tragedy: The Murder of Stanford White</span></em></a><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> by Rick Geary (Nantier, Beall, Minoustchine Publishing, 2013, 80 pages). Rick Geary is the master of short, illustrated stories, many of them having to do with celebrated crime cases such as the Lindberg kidnapping, Sacco and Vanzetti, Lizzie Borden, and Jack the Ripper. In his latest book he presents the cold-blooded murder of famed architect Stanford White by millionaire Harry K. Thaw. Thaw, an insanely jealous husband of former showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, kills White at he sits in the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden -- a building designed by White and considered his masterpiece -- on the evening of June 23, 1906. Five years earlier White had a brief affair with the 17-year-old showgirl. In 80 pages of narrative and illustrations Geary tells of this fatal triangle in a detached style that manages to bring to the surface the roiling passions behind this most unlikely murder. It's quite an accomplishment to behold. </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/1783462140" rel="nofollow"><em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61B0IMzFnML._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="87" />John George Haigh: The Acid-Bath Murderer</span></em></a><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> by Jonathan Oates (Pen &amp; Sword True Crime, 2014, hardback, 212 pages).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Serial Killers, no matter how different their modus operandi, have two things in common: a total lack of conscience and the complete lack of remorse. In the late 1940s, John George Haigh, an intelligent, well-educated man from a strongly religious family of Plymouth Brethren, embarked on a killing spree that stunned London. Haigh was intent on committing unsolvable murders by dissolving his victims' bodies in acid, removing all traces of their existence. The book reconstructs the murders in graphic, forensic detail one at a time and the trial that followed. </span></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Topics:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/topics/crime-books-and-films" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Crime Books and Films</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Authors:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">J. Patrick O&#039;Connor</a></div></div></div>Thu, 21 May 2015 14:27:53 +0000admin1954 at http://www.crimemagazine.comhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/book-em-vol-43#commentsThe Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamalhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/framing-mumia-abu-jamal-1
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p align="center"><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/1556527446" rel="nofollow"><img src="http://www.crimemagazine.com/sites/default/files/mumia-bookcover.JPG" alt="" height="278" width="185" /></a></p>
<p align="center">Excerpt from the book <a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/1556527446" rel="nofollow"><em>The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal</em> </a></p>
<p align="center"><span style="font-size: large;">by <a href="http://crimemagazine.com/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" rel="nofollow">J. Patrick O'Connor</a></span></p>
<p align="center"><strong>Chapter One</strong></p>
<p align="center"><strong>A Cause Celebre</strong></p>
<p>Mumia Abu-Jamal has been on death row since 1982. Over the years, as a result of his prison writings, the former radio reporter who prided himself on being "the voice of the voiceless" has attracted an astonishing level of national and international support that has turned the "Free Mumia" movement into the cause celebre of all 3,600 death-row cases in the United States. The Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police and the slain officer's widow, Maureen Faulkner, doggedly lead the “Fry Mumia” side of the controversy.</p>
<p>In December of 2001 U.S. District Court Judge William H. Yohn Jr. overturned Abu-Jamal's death sentence, evoking images of Solomon's decision to cut the baby in half. While Judge Yohn's controversial decision erased the death sentence that had hung over Abu-Jamal for almost 20 years, that was all it did. Judge Yohn's ruling denied the 20 other defense claims of constitutional violations set forth in Abu-Jamal's <em>habeas corpus</em> petition, thus upholding Abu-Jamal's conviction for murdering Officer Faulkner on Dec. 9, 1981. Overturning Abu-Jamal's death sentence would normally have meant that Abu-Jamal would have been taken off death row and placed among the regular prison population for the duration of the appeal process. But in a particularly spiteful maneuver, Philadelphia D.A. Lynne Abraham requested that Judge Yohn stay the order lifting Abu-Jamal's death sentence. The judge agreed. As a result, Abu-Jamal – who turned54 on April 24, 2008 – remains on death row 22 to 23 hours a day on weekdays and 24 hours a day on weekends in a cell at the super-max State Correctional Institute in Greene, Pa., 50 miles south of Pittsburgh on the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He is allowed approved visitors for one two-hour period per week, but must speak with them, in handcuffs, from behind one-inch thick Plexiglas.</p>
<p>In rendering his 272-page decision, Judge Yohn left the door open a crack for another federal appeal by certifying one of the claims advanced in Abu-Jamal’s <em>habeas corpus</em> petition. If Judge Yohn had not certified that one claim, Abu-Jamal’s appeals, for all practical purposes, would have been over. Barring an unlikely intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court or an even more unlikely clemency by a future governor of Pennsylvania, Abu-Jamal would spend the rest of his life in prison.</p>
<p>All that changed radically on Dec. 6, 2005 when a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued an order to hear arguments from Abu-Jamal’s new defense team on the claim certified by Judge Yohn as well as two others raised by the defense and one by the state.</p>
<p>Abu-Jamal’s new attorneys – led by Robert R. Bryan of San Francisco – appealed, as they were entitled to, the one claim Judge Yohn certified, but added several other claims of constitutional violations arising from Abu-Jamal’s trial and his Post- Conviction Relief Act hearing held in 1995 that they hoped the appeals court would consider. In a stunning victory for the defense, the Third Circuit agreed to hear arguments on two of those additional claims. One concerns the prosecutor’s summation to the jury during the guilt phase of the trial and the other the alleged bias of the judge who presided at Abu-Jamal’s post-conviction proceedings, Common Pleas Court Judge Albert Sabo, who was also Abu-Jamal’s original trial judge.</p>
<p>The claim that Judge Yohn had certified for appeal in 2001, known as a <em>Batson</em> claim, pertained to the prosecutor’s use of peremptory challenges to exclude blacks from the jury.</p>
<p>The Third Circuit also agreed to hear the prosecution claim challenging Judge Yohn’s overturning Abu-Jamal’s death sentence.</p>
<p>Robert Bryan, Abu-Jamal’s lead defense attorney, called the Third Circuit’s order “the most important decision affecting my client, Mumia Abu-Jamal, since the lower federal court ruling in December 2001,” revoking Abu-Jamal’s death sentence. Bryan, with over 35-years of experience in litigating death-penalty cases, said all three defense claims “are of enormous constitutional significance and go to the very essence of Mumia’s right to a fair trial, due process of law, and equal protection under the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.” Hugh Burns, the Philadelphia D.A.’s office appellate chief, called the order a “major blow.”</p>
<p>The blow was so major that, after over 25 years on death row, the probability of Abu-Jamal being granted a new trial is now high. Two of the claims the appellate court agreed to hear regard <em>prima facie</em> violations of Abu-Jamal’s constitutional rights. At Abu-Jamal’s trial Prosecutor Joseph McGill told the jury in his summation that if they found Abu-Jamal guilty of first-degree murder that "there would be appeal after appeal and perhaps there could be a reversal of the case, or whatever, so that may not be final." This type of language undermines the jury’s need to find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. He brazenly said this despite the fact that in an earlier capital case when he had used similar language to coax a jury to a death-sentence verdict with Judge Sabo presiding, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had overturned the verdict. (McGill used nearly the same language during the sentencing phase of Abu-Jamal’s trial when he successfully argued for the imposition of the death penalty.)</p>
<p>On the other claim, the <em>Batson</em> claim, McGill did use at least 10 and most likely 11 preemptory challenges to exclude blacks from serving on Abu-Jamal’s jury. In a city with a black population of 44 percent at the time of Abu-Jamal’s trial, only three blacks were impaneled. One of those was dismissed – for violating jury sequestration – by Judge Sabo after the first day of testimony and replaced by a white male.</p>
<p>The other claim, that Judge Sabo was biased against Abu-Jamal during his Post-Conviction Relief Act hearings, is a judgment call the appellate court judges will make based on the transcripts from those proceedings and the briefs filed by opposing counsel on the issue. If the judges were to find such bias, amply demonstrated by Judge Sabo throughout the hearings, they could order those hearings reopened. Those hearings could well lead to a new trial for Abu-Jamal on numerous other grounds that Abu-Jamal’s new defense team could introduce there. And there will be no Judge Sabo presiding at these hearings. He died in 2002.</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="center"> </p>
<p align="center"><strong>Chapter Two</strong></p>
<p align="center"><strong>Who Killed Officer Daniel Faulkner?</strong></p>
<p align="center"><strong> </strong></p>
<p>That Abu-Jamal's trial was, in so many different ways, a travesty of justice is irrefutable to his legions of supporters. And they are right: His trial was riddled with so many types of judicial and prosecutorial abuses that it was a sham from beginning to end. Judge Yohn's failure to overturn Abu-Jamal's conviction on legal and constitutional grounds in 2001 merely extended the sham.</p>
<p>But did Abu-Jamal murder Faulkner?</p>
<p>One of the most perplexing aspects of the Abu-Jamal case – for many of his supporters and all of his detractors – is that Abu-Jamal, in all his books and articles, radio essays, and his infrequent interviews with reporters, never gave his version of what happened the night Faulkner was killed. Not doing so was partly the advice of his counsel at the time, but mostly it seemed to stem from his conviction that because he was denied the right to represent himself at his murder trial that he would only tell his version of the events at a retrial in front of a jury of his peers. Another theory, advanced in a biography of Abu-Jamal written by Terry Bisson and published in 2000 entitled <em>On a Move: The Story of Mumia Abu-Jamal</em>, is that Faulkner shot him as he approached and he blacked out. The biography picks up the account just after Abu-Jamal got out of his taxi to come to his brother's aid.</p>
<blockquote><p> </p>
<p>He ran across the street. Was he yelling? He doesn't know. Doesn't remember.</p>
<p>The cop was facing him. He never heard a sound, but he knew he had been shot because something lifted him off the ground, almost gently, and he was in the air.</p>
<p><em>He knew</em>. As a [Black] Panther he had expected it, imagined it, for years. It was almost anti-climatic. He waited for the sound. Then he saw the pavement rushing up. He thinks he cried out, because he knew he was going to hit hard, face first, because he couldn't make his arms work. Then everything went black, and he never felt the ground at all…</p>
<p>"What happened?"</p>
<p>Billy was upside down.</p>
<p>Mumia was looking up at him. "Are you okay?"</p>
<p>Billy was shaking his head, not okay.</p>
<p>People were running.</p>
<p>Not okay. Blood everywhere.</p>
<p>Then sirens, far away, then closer.</p>
<p>Mumia tried to sit up. Then there they were, the police, and it was just like before, just like '68, just like the [Gov. George] Wallace rally. Cops bending over him, cops snarling, kicking, careful of their shoes because of blood everywhere…</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>If Abu-Jamal did not shoot Faulkner, then who did? Abu-Jamal's defense at trial was that one or more of the people who various eyewitnesses reported seeing run from the scene immediately after Faulkner was shot killed him. This hypothesis got scant weight at trial when one of the two witnesses the defense produced to assert it – a prostitute under intense pressure from the D.A.’s office – recanted her written statement to the police about seeing two black men flee the murder scene.</p>
<p>As early as mid-1989 the possibility of a shooter other than Abu-Jamal began to re-emerge when New York attorney Rachel Wolkenstein of the radical Partisan Defense Committee, who was working pro bono for Abu-Jamal on matters relating to his prison conditions, heard that a prisoner at Pennsylvania State Correctional Institute in Hunlock Creek, Pa. had information about Faulkner's murder. According to a declaration Wolkenstein filed in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas in 2001, she first interviewed Arnold R. Beverly at Hunlock Creek in 1989. She stated that Beverly told her he was present when Faulkner was shot and that Abu-Jamal had not shot Faulkner. Beverly told her that Faulkner was killed at the behest of Philadelphia police officers because he was interfering with police payoffs for prostitution and drugs in the Center City precinct where Faulkner was assigned. Beverly denied that he had shot Faulkner and refused to identify who did. He told her he would not testify about Faulkner's shooting, even if under subpoena.</p>
<p>Wolkenstein stated that Beverly named a black police officer by the name of Boston (whom she later confirmed to be Philadelphia Police Officer Lawrence Boston) as being involved in the arrangements to kill Faulkner and "that some police officers were on the scene to ensure the 'hit' went off as planned." She stated that Beverly further informed her that the prosecution's main eyewitness against Abu-Jamal, prostitute Cynthia White, "turned tricks" for the police. As time went by, Beverly would not be alone in this claim.</p>
<p>In 1990, Wolkenstein learned of William Singletary, a tow-truck operator who claimed to have been an eyewitness to Faulkner's murder. In a sworn deposition, Singletary testified that he witnessed Faulkner's shooting and that Abu-Jamal did not shoot him. Singletary, a cousin of former Chicago Bear linebacker Mike Singletary, said the shooter was a black male wearing a green Army coat who fled the scene immediately after the shooting. Singletary said he gave this account to the police hours after the shooting, but that the police officer taking his statement tore it up and forced him to sign a fabricated statement under threat of harm. Singletary would reiterate this claim at Abu-Jamal’s post-conviction relief hearing in 1995.</p>
<p>In March of 1999, Wolkenstein stated in her affidavit that she met with Beverly two additional times at an undisclosed address to interview him. At the first meeting, she stated that Beverly reconfirmed his prior account that Abu-Jamal had not shot Faulkner, telling her that he was also shot and wounded, and that he had bled at the scene. "He also told me that he wore a green Army jacket that night." In the second interview, "…Beverly confessed that he himself shot P. O. Faulkner. He told me that someone else fired the first shot that hit P. O. Faulkner [in the back], and then Beverly ran across the street and shot the officer in the face. He stated that Abu-Jamal arrived later and did not shoot anyone. According to Beverly, Mr. Abu-Jamal was shot by a police officer other than Faulkner."</p>
<p>On June 8, 1999, Beverly signed a sworn confession that he and another man, whom he refused to identify, had murdered Faulkner and that "Abu-Jamal had nothing to do with the shooting." In his sworn confession, Beverly reiterated that organized crime figures and police officers were involved in the plan to shoot Faulkner, and that police officers were present at the shooting.</p>
<p>Instead of being the major breakthrough revelation for Abu-Jamal's defense team, the Beverly confession would end up rupturing it. Lead counsel Leonard Weinglass, according to Wolkenstein's declaration, dismissed the confession "out of hand and offered the excuse that presenting this confession would risk 'losing credibility' with a federal court judge." (At the time, Abu-Jamal's federal <em>habeas</em> petition was before Judge Yohn.) Beverly’s extensive criminal record would provide any defense attorney with misgivings regarding his credibility. For a wide assortment of felonies, including burglary, theft, receiving stolen property, criminal conspiracy, and weapons possession, Beverly had been sent to prison six times, twice for up to 10 years.</p>
<p>Weinglass did not want anything to do with Beverly. In an attempt to get Wolkenstein to back off, Weinglass had Beverly take a polygraph exam administered by Earl Rawlings. Wolkenstein stated in her affidavit that the exam was inconclusive on some questions covered, but that Rawlings was not qualified to conduct a polygraph test and "performed an incompetent examination." She stated that Rawlings did conclude that "Beverly was being truthful when he said that he was present at the scene of the shooting and that Mr. Abu-Jamal was not the shooter."</p>
<p>Wolkenstein subsequently had Beverly re-tested by polygrapher Dr. Charles Honts, a nationally recognized expert in administering polygraphs. Honts reported in a sworn statement that "Beverly confessed to him during the polygraph examination and that the polygraph test results supported the truthfulness of Arnold Beverly's confession that he – and not Mumia Abu-Jamal – shot police officer Faulkner."</p>
<p>Despite the bombshell exculpatory evidence that Beverly's confession presented Abu-Jamal's defense team – now supported by Honts's polygraph of Beverly – Weinglass refused to use the confession as evidence of Abu-Jamal's innocence by either presenting it in a supplemental post-conviction petition in state court or using it in state court filings to renew motions for discovery, ballistic testing, and DNA testing of the physical evidence.</p>
<p>According to the controversial book <em>Executing Justice: An Inside Account of the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal</em>, written by Daniel R. Williams and published in May of 2001 by St. Martin's Press, Weinglass refused to advance the Beverly confession because he agreed with Williams that Beverly's "story was insane." Weinglass brought Williams to Abu-Jamal's defense team in 1992, shortly after Abu-Jamal had named Weinglass to be his chief legal counsel. Abu-Jamal, claiming that the publication of the book was a breach of his attorney/client relationship, filed an unsuccessful suit to stop the book’s release. The prosecution, as predicted by Wolkenstein, would use passages from Williams's book in court filings to oppose the admission of the Beverly confession as well as to discredit preemptively other defense initiatives such as Singletary's new testimony. </p>
<p>In response to Weinglass's refusal to use the Beverly confession, Wolkenstein resigned from the defense team in July of 1999, as did attorney Jonathan Piper, a litigator at the Chicago office of Sonnenschein Nath &amp; Rosenthal. Piper had worked pro bono for Abu-Jamal throughout the 1990s, drafting legal papers and providing legal and factual research assistance, including interviews with FBI sources active in investigating rampant police corruption in Philadelphia at the time of Faulkner's death. </p>
<p>Subsequent to the publication of Williams’s book in May of 2001, Abu-Jamal discharged Weinglass and Williams from his defense team.</p>
<p>Within days, Abu-Jamal's new defense team, consisting of Marlene Kamish of Chicago, Eliot Lee Grossman of Los Angeles, Michael Farrell of Philadelphia, and Nick Brown of the United Kingdom, issued three sworn affidavits: one from Abu-Jamal, one from his brother Billy Cook, and the June 8, 1999 affidavit from erstwhile hit man Beverly that Weinglass had refused to release. Abu-Jamal's affidavit, which was dated May 4, 2001, contained 34 assertions detailing his version of the events surrounding Faulkner's killing in sequential detail. He stated that he did not kill Faulkner and was himself shot in the chest by a police officer as he approached the scene. The shot caused him to collapse and to black out until other police arrived and began beating him. The full text of Abu-Jamal's affidavit:</p>
<p>[begin block quote]</p>
<p>I, MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, declare:</p>
<p>1. I am the Petitioner in this action. If called as a witness I could and would testify to the following from my own personal knowledge: <br /> 2. I did not shoot Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. I had nothing to do with the killing of Officer Faulkner. I am innocent. <br /> 3. At my trial I was denied the right to defend myself. I had no confidence in my court-appointed attorney, who never even asked me what happened the night I was shot and the police officer was killed; and I was excluded from at least half the trial. <br /> 4. Since I was denied all my rights at my trial I did not testify. I would not be used to make it look like I had a fair trial. <br /> 5. I did not testify in the post-conviction proceedings in 1995 on the advice of my attorney, Leonard Weinglass, who specifically told me not to testify. <br /> 6. Now for the first time I have been given an opportunity to tell what happened to me in the early morning hours of December 9, 1981. This is what happened: <br /> 7. As a cabbie I often chose 13th and Locust Street because it was a popular club area with a lot of foot traffic. <br /> 8. I worked out of United Cab on the night of 12/9/81. <br /> 9. I believe I had recently returned from dropping off a fare in West Philly. <br /> 10. I was filling out my log when I heard some shouting. <br /> 11. I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw a flashing dome light of a police cruiser. This wasn't unusual. <br /> 12. I continued to fill out my log/trip sheet when I heard what sounded like gunshots. <br /> 13. I looked again into my rear view mirror and saw people running up and down Locust. <br /> 14. As I scanned I recognized my brother standing in the street staggering and dizzy. <br /> 15. I immediately exited the cab and ran to his scream. <br /> 16. As I came across the street I saw a uniformed cop turn toward me gun in hand, saw a flash and went down to my knees. <br /> 17. I closed my eyes and sat still trying to breathe. <br /> 18. The next thing that I remember I felt myself being kicked, hit and being brought out of a stupor. <br /> 19. When I opened my eyes, I saw cops all around me. <br /> 20. They were hollering and cursing, grabbing and pulling on me. I felt faint finding it hard to talk. <br /> 21. As I looked through this cop crowd all around me, I saw my brother, blood running down his neck and a cop lying on his back on the pavement. <br /> 22. I was pulled to my feet and then rammed into a telephone pole, beaten where I fell, and thrown into a paddy wagon. <br /> 23. I think I slept until I heard the door open and a white cop in a white shirt came in cursing and hit me in the forehead. <br /> 24. I don't remember what he said much except a lot of "niggers," "black mother- fuckers" and what not. <br /> 25. I believe he left and I slept. I don't remember the wagon moving for a while and then it did [move] for sometime. <strong><br /></strong> 26. I awoke to hear the driver speaking over the radio about his prisoner. <br /> 27. I was informed by the anonymous crackle on the radio that I was en route to the police administration building a few blocks away. <br /> 28. Then, it sounded like [someone] I.D.'d [identified] as “M-l” came on the radio band telling the driver to go to Jefferson Hospital. <br /> 29. Upon arrival I was thrown from the wagon to the ground and beaten. <br /> 30. I was beaten again at the doors of Jefferson [Hospital]. <br /> 31. Because of the blood in my lungs it was difficult to speak, and impossible to holler. <br /> 32. I never confessed to anything because I had nothing to confess to. <br /> 33. I never said I shot the policeman. I did not shoot the policeman. <br /> 34. 1 never said I hoped he died. I would never say something like that. </p>
<p> I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States that the above is true and correct and was executed by me on 3 May, 2001, at Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. <br /> MUMIA ABU-JAMAL</p>
<p>[end block quote]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Like Abu-Jamal, Cook had never previously stated what he witnessed at the scene. Cook, whom Faulkner was in the process of arresting when the officer was shot to death, exonerated his brother, but he also asserted that a passenger in his car – his long-time street-vendor partner Kenneth “Poppi” Freeman – had admitted to him that he shot Faulkner as part of a conspiracy to kill the officer. Cook's affidavit was dated April 29, 2001. (Freeman died in 1985 under suspicious circumstances hours after Philadelphia police firebombed the MOVE house and destroyed 61 row houses in the process. His body was found bound, gagged, and naked in a vacant lot. The coroner listed his cause of death as a heart attack. He was 31. When asked at Abu-Jamal’s post conviction relief hearing if he knew the circumstances of Freeman’s death, his friend Arnold Howard answered, “My understanding is he was handcuffed and shot up (with drugs) and dumped on Grink’s lot on Roosevelt Boulevard, buck naked.”) The full text of Cook's affidavit:</p>
<p>[begin block quote]<br /> I, BILLY COOK, declare: </p>
<p> 1. If called to testify as a witness in this matter I would competently testify to the following from my own personal knowledge: <br /> 2. On the night of December 9, 1981 I was with my partner Kenneth Freeman, my friend from childhood. <br /> 3. Mumia had stopped by at my stand [a vending stand in Center City] that night. He would do that periodically. Mumia had been robbed about a week before. <br /> 4. I left my gun locked up at my stand that night, but Poppi [Kenneth Freeman’s nickname] always carried his gun. It was a <strong>.38.</strong> <br /> 5. I probably was wearing a black knit cap, I had dreds and always tucked them in. <br /> 6. We had closed up late at night. <br /> 7. Kenny (Poppi) and I had hit a few bars. We were just unwinding. We used to do that all the time after we closed up the vending stand for the night. <br /> 8. We were headed along Locust. <br /> 9. Poppi had got some beer and gotten back in the car. <br /> 10. At Locust at about Juniper I saw flashing lights of a police car. He followed me for about a half a block and I pulled over behind another car in the first empty spot on the south side of Locust. <br /> 11. I had wooden bumpers on my car and they were supposed to be metal. I had been stopped for that but he never said anything about that or gave any reason to have stopped me. I never hit him. <br /> 12. I had never seen him before. I knew the cops that worked in the district where my stand was. Locust and 13th is an adjacent district but I didn't ever see him before. <br /> 13. I got out my car. Poppi stayed in the car in the passenger seat. I let him (the cop) know I was not happy. <br /> 14. After that we went back and forth verbal confrontation. He pulls out a stick or some kind of object and slaps me in the head three times. By that time he had me on the side of the car, I started bleeding profusely. So I go back to my car to get my paperwork. <br /> 15. I never raised my hand to the policeman. I may have gone to block him when he was hitting me. That's all. I am not that stupid. I never hit a cop. He hit me with a flashlight and I was bleeding but then he let me go back in my car. <br /> 16. After that I got in the car. I was in the front seat looking in the back seat. <br /> 17. There were people on the street. There always were in that area. The bars were supposed to close by two o'clock but the clubs stayed open later. Some until 5 o'clock. They served drinks anyway. <br /> 18. I can't say I recall where other people were and I can't describe where anyone was, but there were people milling about. I never saw a taxi that they later claimed was there. I don't really know how many people were on the street. But there were always people out there it didn't matter what time. It could be five in the morning and there would be people. <br /> 19. When I heard the first shot I was in the driver’s seat facing toward the back of the car looking for something in the back seat to give to the cop like an owner's card. I am not the organized type and I didn't keep papers in the glove compartment. The back seat had a lot of papers and things from the stand, teddy bears, stuffed animals. We sold all that kind of stuff. Like special stuff for the holidays like on Valentine's Day we'd have Valentines and we sold novelty items and artificial flowers. <br /> 20. When I had gotten in my car Faulkner was in front of the car by the hood where he had stopped me and frisked me. When I was in the car looking in the back, I heard gun shots and saw sparks but I didn't see him shot. I saw flashes of a gun out of the side of my eye. He was standing in front of the car but I didn't see him shot. I was facing the back of the car. <br /> 21. Out of my peripheral vision I knew, I could feel other people around but I can't say where they were. His car was behind mine and the policeman was standing on the street between my car and whatever car was parked in front of me. <br /> 22. When I first saw my brother, he was running. He was feet away from me. We hadn't made any plans to meet that night or anything like that and I didn't even realize that he came around that area there to pick up fares. He had nothing in his hands. I heard a shot and I saw him stumble. I didn't see who shot him. He was stumbling forward. <br /> 23. It is strange people told me later everything happened in a few seconds but I could never see it that way. It seemed like everything was happening at once, but it took a long time. I have tried over the years but I can't see it as a few seconds. It seems to me as if it was 45 seconds not three. <br /> 24. When I was looking in the back seat Poppi was still there and then I looked and Poppi's door was open. He had been in the passenger seat and I don't know which way he had gone. He left the area right after this happened. <br /> 25. Later Poppi talked about a plan to kill Faulkner. He told me that he was armed on that night and participated in the shooting. He was connected and knew all kinds of people. I used to ask him about it but he talked but never said much. He wasn't a talker. I didn't see Poppi for a while after that. <br /> 26. Poppi had been in Germany in the army. That night he was wearing his green army jacket. You know just a regulation army jacket. The jacket he always wore. He had been discharged. I don't know for what. <br /> 27. I got out. I wanted to run; maybe I could have gotten away. I even started to run. I did. But I couldn't run because of my brother. Not after I saw my brother down on the ground. <br /> 28. I spoke to him. I told him, "I'm here for you." I don't remember his answering, but I remember his groan. <br /> 29. I saw a gun on the street. It was in the gutter. I kicked it under my car. Before the cops came. <br /> 30. If they asked me something, I don't remember. I didn't answer them anything. I sure don't remember them reading me my rights. I knew [Police Officer] Shoemaker. He used to stop by my stand and sit there and smoke weed. His wife used come to my stand with him. <br /> 31. I think they took me away before they took Mumia or the cop. I remember them pushing me. But I can't remember whether I was in a paddy wagon or a squad car or whether I was sitting up or not. My mind was just not to talk. <br /> 32. When they had me in the police station they threatened to kill me and throw me in the river. <br /> 33. I have been afraid for my life since that night. I have been afraid to tell anything about what happened. Wouldn't you be? <br /> 34. They took me in a room. There were two officers black and white. I was saying things to give them something to chew on. <br /> 35. I finally came to my senses. I didn't like the whole idea of making a statement. They wanted me to sign a statement but I just wouldn't do it. I told them I wanted to see my lawyer. I didn't like it. So I just wouldn't sign. <br /> 36. I think I was in jail a day or two then they let me out on bail. <br /> 37. I had been living in Center City, but I couldn't stay there after it happened. I got help and moved out of my apartment in the middle of the night. And moved back in with my mother. <br /> 38. I remember [Attorney Anthony] Jackson coming to my house several times. My mother and sister were there. I don't remember him ever interviewing me. I just remember him trying to calm us. <br /> 39. I don't remember meeting with him anywhere else except at my mother's house. He never asked me to testify. [Billy Cook’s attorney] Alva advised me not to testify. My lawyer implied to me that if I came to court I would also be charged with murder. I had to pay him $1,000. <br /> 40. Alva was Freeman's lawyer too. <br /> 41. If they (Jackson) had said they wanted me to testify I would have done it but they never did. <br /> 42. At PCRA, I was expecting to testify. Leonard [Weinglass] and Rachel [Wolkenstein] were giving me cross signals. Rachel wanted me to testify but Leonard didn't. So I didn't testify. In 1999, I was asked to testify again and I said I would. <br /> 43. I will testify now. <br /> 44. Mumia was not holding a gun. Mumia never intervened in anything between me and the cop. <br /> 45. I had nothing to do with the shooting or killing of the police officer. My brother, Mumia Abu-Jamal, had nothing do with shooting or killing the policeman. </p>
<p> I declare under penalty of perjury, under the laws of the State of Pennsylvania and the laws of the United States of America, that the above is true and correct and was executed by me on 4-29-01 at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.</p>
<p> BILLY COOK <br /> [end block quote]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Beverly's affidavit was even more astounding – and in various ways. It stated that he and another man whom he refused to ever identify – presumably Kenneth Freeman – were hired by the mob to murder Faulkner because Faulkner had been cracking down on prostitution, gambling, and drug activities in the area. Beverly stated that his unnamed accomplice was the first to shoot Faulkner – shooting him in the back – but that he was the one who stood over Faulkner and shot him in the face at point-blank range. He said Abu-Jamal “was shot shortly after that by a uniformed police officer who arrived on the scene.”</p>
<p>The problem with Beverly’s account, just as Weinglass viewed it, was that it was filled with improbabilities. Although it contained some nuggets of telling detail about Faulkner’s shooting – much in the same way that Singletary’s did – credible eyewitnesses Michael Scanlan and Robert Harkins saw no such unfolding of events. They each saw Abu-Jamal running toward Faulkner while the officer was still standing.</p>
<p>Was Faulkner the FBI informant that Beverly, in his affidavit, said he was, and that Cook, in his affidavit, referenced Freeman as saying he was? It seems probable that he was. A sophisticated “Topcon”camera, the type used then by the FBI in surveillance, was retrieved by police from Faulkner's patrol car after his shooting and turned over to the lead detective on the case. In Rachel Wolkenstein’s 2001 affidavit, she stated that in 1998 she interviewed Donald Hersing, whom she identified as the FBI’s confidential source during its 1981-1982 investigation of Center City police corruption, and he “confirmed that corrupt police were very concerned about possible police informants in the winter of 1981-82.” Hersing operated two Center City nightclubs that were being extorted by high-ranking Philadelphia police officials.</p>
<p>Another strong indication that Faulkner was an FBI informant was, according to Wolkenstein in her affidavit, was information uncovered by her colleague Jonathan Piper when he spoke with the lead federal prosecutor in the corruption case against John DeBenedetto, the head of the Central Division (Sixth Precinct) where Faulkner worked. Wolkenstein stated that the federal prosecutor told Piper “that Philadelphia police officers were sources in the investigation, including one source who had a brother who was also a police officer.” When Maureen Faulkner testified at the beginning of the trial, McGill referenced her husband having a brother who had “worked for the police.”</p>
<p>Wolkenstein also stated in her affidavit that George Sherwood, the FBI agent who oversaw the bureau’s crime squad in Philadelphia and was involved in the investigation of Sixth Precinct corruption, had subpoenaed Faulkner’s Army records earlier in 1982. She said former FBI agents advised her that “the most plausible explanation for this was that Faulkner was an informant, confidential source or an investigation target.”</p>
<p>Wolkenstein stated that Sherwood “advised our investigator that unless the FBI had an investigative interest in a matter the FBI would not have assisted another agency (including the district attorney or the U.S. attorney) with the retrieval of Officer Faulkner’s military records.”</p>
<p> She further averred, “FBI records on Daniel Faulkner disclosed an FBI-PH airtel [telex] to the director [William H. Webster] dated 12-30-81 that no written summary of the case was being prepared because of the ongoing criminal investigation [into Center City police corruption] and pending legal litigation.” Wolkenstein stated that former FBI agents she interviewed about the order for no written summary of Faulkner’s death found it “highly unusual.” Another curious item that appears in Faulkner’s FBI file after his death is the sentence, “Philadelphia [FBI office] strongly recommends letter to wife [Maureen Faulkner] from director.”</p>
<p> If Faulkner were killed because he was a police informant, he would not have been the first or the last Philadelphia police officer during the early 1980s to die under circumstances suggesting a directed “hit.” Officer James Mason was shot to death by a sniper in May of 1981. Four years later, Officer Thomas Trench was executed in his police car when a gunman shot him in the face at point-blank range through the open driver’s window, indicating that Trench knew his assailant.</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="center"><strong>Chapter Three</strong></p>
<p align="center"><strong>Frank Rizzo</strong></p>
<p align="center"> </p>
<p>To step back and attempt to understand the Mumia Abu-Jamal case it is necessary to consider Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia as well as the small, rag-tag, back-to-nature group called MOVE that Rizzo detested and wanted to destroy. Over time, Abu-Jamal's fate became inextricably tied to MOVE’s.</p>
<p>Rizzo was not just a lightning rod for racial strife. He built his career on it, ascending from beat cop, to precinct captain, to commander, to police chief (1967-1971) to mayor (1972-1979), promising along the way to make "Attila the Hun look like a faggot." Despite his bravado, Rizzo was less than willing to enforce the law when it came to corralling the high-profile mobsters who acted with virtual impunity during his long career. “…on Frank Rizzo’s watch, the South Philadelphia mob grew unabated,” wrote Sal Paolantonio in his mostly fawning biography of Rizzo entitled <em>Frank Rizzo:</em> <em>The Last Big Man in Big City America</em>, published in 1993.</p>
<p>For his willingness to wield a nightstick early in his career, his fellow officers nicknamed him “The Cisco Kid.”</p>
<p>Blacks called him Rizzio. To many of his fellow Italian-Americans in South Philly he was "The Bambino." To Paolantonio and other admirers he was simply “The Big Man.”</p>
<p>In <em>On a Move</em>, Bisson recounted a classic Rizzo display that occurred in 1967, during Rizzo's first year as police chief, when 3,000 black high school students marched on the Board of Education Building to demand black studies be included in the curriculum. Rizzo, like George Wallace at the University of Alabama, stood in the doorway as the students approached. Then he shouted his order to the police: "Get their black asses!" Police waded in among the young demonstrators with nightsticks, injuring dozens of students and beating 15 students so severely that they had to be hospitalized. While no police officer would be charged or disciplined for the assault, citations for resisting arrest and disorderly conduct were handed out to many students. Rizzo denied he had given the order to assault the students until he listened the next day to himself say it on videotape at television station WFIL played for him by reporter Larry Kane. “When he saw that he had said it, he just turned his head and left,” Kane said in an <em>Inquirer </em>interview.</p>
<p>Under Rizzo, police lawlessness was so commonplace and pervasive that the U.S. Justice Department sued the city's entire police force for civil-rights violations in 1979. A federal court dismissed the suit on jurisdictional grounds. Later, President Carter and the majority of Philadelphians would come to view Rizzo as a national embarrassment. By the late 1970s police graft was so intertwined with underworld activities that the Philly Police Department, particularly the Center City precinct to which Faulkner was assigned, was the target of at least three ongoing FBI probes that would result in the indictments and convictions of more than 30 Central Division Philadelphia police officers, including Police Inspector Alfonso Giordano, the ranking officer at the scene when Abu-Jamal was arrested for Faulkner's murder.</p>
<p>There have always been a lot of skeletons in the City of Brotherly Love’s closet. As Frederick Douglas wrote in 1862, “There is not perhaps anywhere to be found a city in which prejudice against color is more rampant than in Philadelphia…It has its white schools and its colored schools, its white churches and its colored churches, its white Christianity and its colored Christianity…and the line is everywhere tightly drawn between them.” </p>
<p>Philadelphia remains, essentially, a city of ghettos. Its enormous inner-city black slums are hemmed in by a series of ethnic neighborhoods that stretch out to the south and east in miles and miles of nearly identical row houses. Further removed are the neighborhoods to the west, and beyond them, just outside the city's limits, the pristine suburbs roll, one after the other, along the storied Main Line.</p>
<p>In Rizzo, the Italians and the various Slavs, the Irish, and the Germans had their man who was more than willing to stand up to the expanding black population as it encroached on the boundaries of the city's ethnic neighborhoods. MOVE's ramshackle house in previously all-white West Philly would be the spot where Rizzo would draw a line in the sand.</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<h1 align="left"><strong>Chapter Four</strong></h1>
<p><strong> MOVE</strong></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em>In a certain universal sense, the group calling itself MOVE, from the early 1970s up to the current day, has acted like a vortex into which have flowed all of modern civilization’s troubles.</em> – Robin Wagner-Pacifici, <em>Discourse &amp; Destruction: The City of Philadelphia versus MOVE</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Rizzo didn't create MOVE, but he might as well have in the sense that every despot needs, in fact demands, a foil. In MOVE, Rizzo had the perfect one. The more he oppressed the group, the stronger, more determined and politically savvy it became; the more he tried to destroy MOVE, the more he exposed his own lawlessness, causing his own career to fall into sunset. When term limits barred him from seeking the mayoralty a third consecutive time, he put his political career to a vote by spearheading a special referendum in 1978 – in the wake of the Powelton MOVE debacle – to alter the city charter. In a massive denunciation, Philadelphia voters told Rizzo eight years was enough, rejecting the referendum 66 percent to 34 percent. “Sixty-six percent of the city’s voters said no to charter change, no to Frank Rizzo, mayor for life,” wrote Paolantonio. “The winners rejoiced as if the walls of totalitarianism had been pulled down.”</p>
<p>Vincent Lopez Leaphart founded MOVE in the early 1970s in Philadelphia and subsequently changed his name to John Africa. Leaphart, in his early 40s at the time, was, like Rizzo, a high school dropout. I.Q. tests at age 7 and 15 revealed scores of 84 and 79 respectively. At age 15 he transferred to a school for students with learning disabilities, only to drop out the following year. At age 17 he was arrested for armed robbery and auto theft. Drafted in 1952, he served two years in the Army, one of them in Korea. Like his father, Leaphart made what living he did as a handyman. In 1966 his wife of five years, Dorothy, brought charges against him for striking her, but the case was dismissed. They divorced the next year.</p>
<p>How Leaphart, who could barely read and write, was able to take on the messiah role he would carve out for himself is a matter of great mystery. His hold over his followers was similar in many respects to the incredibly magnetic pull other cult leaders such as Jim Jones and David Koresh had on their disciples. To this day – more than two decades after his gruesome death at the bombed-out MOVE row house where his beheaded corpse was found with buckshot in both its chest and buttocks – past and present MOVE members venerate him. “Long Live John Africa!” is their mantra.</p>
<p>In 1971 Leaphart moved into the Powelton Community Housing Project – known simply as “The Co-Op” – in the Powelton Village section of West Philadelphia, adjacent to Drexel University. This integrated neighborhood was a haven for free thinkers and ‘60s-style radicals, home to students and faculty from both Drexel and the University of Pennsylvania. Here Leaphart befriended Donald Glassey, a recent master’s graduate in his early 20s from the School of Social Work at Penn. Together, with Leaphart dictating and Glassey taking notes, the two authored in a year’s time what would turn out to be Leaphart’s “naturalistic” philosophy, <em>The Book of Guidelines</em>. Later, this 300-typewritten page manifesto would be known as <em>The Teachings of John Africa</em> and become the framework of the MOVE movement.</p>
<p> Less than two years after Leaphart moved into The Co-Op, its board began eviction proceedings against him for his failure to fumigate his apartment, the source of a major roach infestation now plaguing many of his neighbors. To Leaphart’s naturalist view, roaches and all living things were God’s children, no different than humans.</p>
<p>When Glassey purchased half of a cavernous three-story Victorian house in Powelton in the spring of 1973, he allowed Leaphart – who now referred to himself as John Africa – to move in, bringing with him his sisters Louise James and LaVerne Sims, and their children, as well as a pack of dogs who followed him around and earned him the nickname “Dog Man” in the neighborhood. At first the Leapharts referred to themselves as the American Christian Movement for Life, but soon dropped the references to American and Christian, settling on MOVE. By the mid 1970s there were as many as 30 or 40 MOVE members. They made money by washing cars in the street in front of the house, doing home repairs in the neighborhood, cutting wood, and, in season, selling watermelons and fruits from the front yard.</p>
<p>Most MOVE members were in their 20s and black, but a few were young white women looking for a family to belong to, for something to believe in. <em>In Burning Down the House: MOVE and the Tragedy of Philadelphia</em>, a white teenaged member, Jeanne Africa, is quoted as saying she joined MOVE to acquire “a solid, secure family.” She said John Africa “gave us a lot of solutions to problems we had in The Lifestyle. We had people who were on drugs, he got them off drugs. He was like a messiah.” The teachings of John Africa forbid the use of drugs.</p>
<p>At any one time there could be up to 30 or more MOVE members living in the Powelton house, including small children and infants. MOVE members didn't marry, but monogamous relationships were the rule. Pregnancies were common. In <em>Burning Down</em> <em>the House</em>, the authors John Anderson and Hilary Hevenor describe MOVE’s approach to childbearing: “Progeniture was the order of the day at Headquarters. Sexual potency on the part of MOVE’s men and childbearing on the part of its women were encouraged as part of ‘the natural order of life’…MOVE women were expected not only to bear many children, but to give birth naturally, licking their babies clean, biting off the umbilical cord with their teeth, then eating it.”</p>
<p>John Africa’s grand experiment was to have MOVE children grow up free of the addictions of the “System lifestyle.” No school, no TV, no clothes in summer, and a diet solely of raw fruits and vegetables. There would be no “Distortion Days” for the children like there were occasionally for MOVE adults, days when the adults could gorge themselves on all the junk food and meat they wanted. “Children were considered central figures in the MOVE organization. Babies did not diaper, but defecated in the yard along with the animals MOVE kept,” wrote Robin Wagner-Pacifici.</p>
<p>In a pamphlet MOVE published in 1996 to mark its 25<sup>th</sup> anniversary, MOVE stated its mission:</p>
<p>[begin block quote]</p>
<p>MOVE's work is to stop industry from poisoning the air, the water, the soil, and to put an end to the enslavement of life – people, animals, any form of life. The purpose of John Africa's revolution is to show people how corrupt, rotten, criminally enslaving this system is, show people through John Africa's teaching, the truth, that this system is the cause of all their problems (alcoholism, drug addiction, unemployment, wife abuse, child pornography, every problem in the world) and to set the example of revolution for people to follow when they realize how they've been oppressed, repressed, duped, tricked by the system, this government and see the need to rid themselves of this cancerous system as MOVE does.</p>
<p>[end block quote]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It is beyond ironic that the rebellious MOVE cult took hold in the city William Penn founded as a Quaker colony in 1681. Penn’s bronze statute – a beacon to liberty and tolerance – sits atop Philadelphia’s ornate City Hall. Penn, just as MOVE would do three centuries later, issued tracts, lectured in public, got arrested for unlawful assembly, and scorned courtroom decorum. In 1670, Penn was imprisoned for “declining to doff his hat in court, for further unauthorized preaching, for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown,” according to <em>The First American – The Life &amp; Times of Benjamin Frankl</em>in written by H. W. Brands in 2000. To rid England of the young, highborn firebrand, King Charles II granted Penn a large tract of land west of New Jersey to settle a debt he owed Penn’s recently deceased father.</p>
<p>A passage that could have been included in <em>The Teachings of John Af</em>rica was written in a letter to a friend by Ben Franklin in 1764: “As long as I have known the world, I have observed that wrong is always growing more wrong, till there is no bearing it, and that right, however opposed, comes right at last.”</p>
<p>Characterized by dreadlock hair and the adopted surname Africa (“Africa” for the original homeland of all humankind), MOVE’s members were controversial, confrontational, belligerent, and profane, calling their detractors "motherfuckers." The term “motherfucker” – particularly when MOVE members ranted over loudspeakers or bullhorns – would often be used three or four times in one sentence, in sentence after numbing sentence. MOVE members justified this obscenity by arguing that the real obscenity is the system that allows racism, exploitation, and injustice to flourish. "If our profanity offends you, look around you and see how destructively society is profaning itself. It is the rape of the land, the pollution of the environment, the betrayal and suffering of the masses by corrupt government that is the real obscenity."</p>
<p>According to the MOVE pamphlet, MOVE members saw themselves as "pilgrims with bullhorns" and their Powelton Village house as their Mayflower. MOVE picketed pet stores, circuses, veterinary offices and the zoo ("Let the animals go free!"), challenged visiting celebrities to noisy debates, called Jane Fonda a racist and Jesse Jackson a liar. They took in the stray cats and dogs in the neighborhood, accumulating a pack of more than 30 unvaccinated dogs that roamed the premises. Although MOVE members were vegetarians, they fed their dogs with chunks of raw meat thrown into the yard. They also let their garbage pile up, "composting" in the front yard, a magnet for rats, termites, cockroaches and swarms of insects. All life forms were welcome at the MOVE house. They were the neighbors from hell.</p>
<p><em>The Teachings of John Africa</em> prohibited bathing with soap and proscribed that men and women alike grow their hair to the fullest in “natural” length dreadlocks. The uniform was unisex as well: blue jeans, blue denim jackets, and heavy-soled men’s boots. Members were encouraged to chew garlic for its natural medicinal value.</p>
<p>Anderson and Hevenor described MOVE’s Powelton house this way: “The ramshackle headquarters at 309 N. 33<sup>rd</sup> in Powelton was turned into a compound. The whole of the front lawn was made into a stage for MOVE’s drama. A wooden platform extended from the front porch all the way to an eight-foot high outer fence. Electric bullhorns were mounted in treetops, and the neighborhood was treated to frequent lectures via the powerful sound system. Extemporaneous reading from <em>The Teachings of John Africa</em> blared through the night and into the early morning hours. Neighbors who dared complain soon found themselves denounced openly, loudly, and obscenely. Under such circumstances, powerful drama unfolded almost daily on North 33<sup>rd</sup> Street.”</p>
<p>MOVE became the butt of many cocktail-party and local news broadcast jokes. Most Philadelphians readily bought the news media's version of MOVE as urban savages. By 1975, enough neighbors had complained to the city government about the stench emanating from MOVE's property that the Department of Licenses and Inspections had to respond. Later that year, the city filed a civil suit against MOVE to evict the group from its property. MOVE appealed to the State Supreme Court. The case would drag on for three years until Rizzo came up with his ultimate solution.</p>
<p>By the mid-1970s, MOVE was appearing in public with increasing frequency, demonstrating with bullhorns at political rallies, public forums, and media offices. MOVE, inevitably, made police abuse a focal point. Rizzo, now mayor, responded predictably: The police began to break up MOVE demonstrations and arrest MOVE members on disorderly conduct charges or other misdemeanor violations such as obscenity and failure to disperse. MOVE cases jammed the Philadelphia courts. During a seven-month period in late 1973 and early 1974, the <em>Inquirer</em> reported, 40 different MOVE members were arrested 150 times. Some were sentenced to several years in jail.</p>
<p>The boiling point in the MOVE/police relationship was reached on Sunday, March 28, 1976, when seven jailed MOVE members were released in the afternoon and arrived at the Powelton house around 4 p.m. A noisy celebration carried on into the late evening until neighbors called the police to complain. Upon their arrival, Chuck Africa cursed the police. “Officer Daniel Palermo told reporters that as he was walking back to his car, a brick sailed through the air and caught him in the back of his head. More bricks flew…Bedlam followed,” Anderson and Hevenor reported in their book. Janine Africa told the authors “how the police had drawn their guns and billyclubs and begun to beat everyone present. The police, she said, ‘were going crazy,’ swinging their nightsticks, pushing and shoving the MOVE women away in order to get at their men. When Janine, the baby Life in her arms, tried to shield Phil (Africa), she too was pushed, then fell heavily to the ground. After that, the ‘cops stepped all over me an on me.’ Life Africa lay crushed to the earth.”</p>
<p> Six MOVE men – including three who had been freed from jail that day – were arrested and charged with aggravated assault, riot, resisting arrest, and reckless endangerment. Six wounded Philadelphia police officers were taken to the hospital.</p>
<p>The next morning, MOVE held a news conference at its compound. One MOVE member displayed a broken, blood-stained police nightstick and a police officer’s blue hat. Janine Africa told reporters that her three-week-old son, Life Africa, had been stomped to death on the floor after police knocked her down while holding the baby. “Police Department officials denied the story and hinted strongly that no such child as Life Africa had ever existed,” reported Anderson and Hevenor. “There were, after all, no hospital records of the child’s having been born.” [All MOVE children were home birthed.].</p>
<p>To prove the three-week-old baby boy’s death to the media, MOVE invited a <em>Philadelphia Inquirer</em> photographer and reporter and several local politicians to dinner at their headquarters several days later. After the meal, the guests were shown the baby’s corpse in a shoebox. The guests reported that the stench from the box was overwhelming.</p>
<p>A few weeks later, according to Bisson’s biography, Abu-Jamal interviewed an eyewitness, an old man who had watched it all from a window across the street. "I saw that baby fall," he said. "They were clubbing the mother; I knew the baby was going to get hurt. I even reached for the phone to call the police, before I realized that it <em>was</em> the police. You know what I mean?"</p>
<p>No chargers were filed against the police officers involved in the baby's death. Instead the D.A.'s office pursued prosecution of the six MOVE members arrested that night. Federal authorities informed MOVE that they would investigate the baby’s death, but would require an autopsy to do so. “The MOVE people demurred,” Anderson and Hevenor reported. “Their organization was opposed to the perverted work of scientists and doctors.” Instead, MOVE filed a $26 million civil suit against the city.</p>
<p>By 1976 hundreds of MOVE cases were clogging Philadelphia's justice system, preventing hundreds of non-MOVE related cases from coming to court on time. “Thanks to MOVE, an already overloaded court system had virtually stalled,” the <em>Inquirer </em>reported. To deal with this backlog, court administrators began dismissing numerous MOVE cases.</p>
<p>But three MOVE members were put on trial on charges of assault and resisting arrest in 1976. Robert, Conrad, and Jerry Africa – following the dictates of John Africa – refused to participate in their own defense, ignored courtroom decorum, and were eventually barred from their own trial. Common Pleas Judge Paul Ribner, who would later handle the preliminary hearings in Abu-Jamal's murder trial, tried them in absentia, found them guilty and sentenced them to long prison terms.</p>
<p>By 1977 most MOVE efforts were directed toward getting the three released. On May 20, 1977, after MOVE member Chuck Sims Africa was arrested earlier that day when police stopped his car and found a gun and ammunition in it, MOVE orchestrated its first major confrontation with the police. From a platform recently erected outside its house, various MOVE speakers, wearing khaki, army-style uniforms, demanded over the loudspeaker system the release of their “political prisoners” and an end to the violent harassment by the city. A crowd formed. When the police began arriving, MOVE members brandished firearms – sawed-off shotguns, pistols, rifles, and clubs. This display brought SWAT and Stakeout units. For nine tense hours, some 200 police surrounded the compound and trained an arsenal of weaponry on the front porch. An unidentified MOVE member took the microphone and warned the police, shouting out “the only way they will come in our headquarters is over our dead bodies. If those motherfuckers come in here, they’re going to have to kill everyone in here to do it.”</p>
<p>At 10:30 p.m. MOVE members took their weapons back inside and Police Commissioner Joseph O’Neill ordered the police to disperse.</p>
<p>“The May 20, 1977 confrontation gave MOVE the kind of credence that it had never possessed. News out of Powelton now played on front pages of local newspapers, and Philadelphia television stations often began their broadcasts with MOVE coverage. In a single’s day time, MOVE had become a Story. The possibility of violence commanded attention as no amount of bullhorns and pickets ever could,” Anderson and Hevenor reported.</p>
<p>The confrontation now brought round-the-clock police surveillance to the compound that would continue unabated for the next 10 months.</p>
<p>Four days after the confrontation, Judge Lynne Abraham, now the Philadelphia district attorney, issued 11 warrants for MOVE members on riot charges and "possession of an instrument of crime." Included in the warrants was one for Chuck Sims Africa. The gun taken from his car earlier on May 20 was traced to the gun shop where it was purchased. Records there showed that Leaphart’s old friend, Donald Glassey, had purchased two shotguns and 200 rounds of ammunition eight weeks earlier. Glassey was arrested on June 3 and charged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office with falsifying information on the firearms forms. Unable to make the $25,000 bail and facing a possible five-year prison sentence, Glassey “turned.” On July 21 – in exchange for a reduced sentence, a recommendation of early parole, and a place in the Federal Witness Protection Program – he led federal agents to two cars he had stocked with most of MOVE’s weapons – guns, bombs and ammunition – that he had collected from various MOVE locations to set up the bust. As a result of the bust, federal arrest warrants were issued against Leaphart and Alphonso (Mo Africa) Robbins. Leaphart and Robbins went underground for the next four years until their arrest in Rochester, N.Y. Delbert Orr Africa became MOVE’s interim leader.</p>
<p>One purpose of the 24-hour watch the police set up around the MOVE house was to arrest members when they came off the property. Sue Africa left the premises and was apprehended a few blocks away and jailed. The other members remained at the house as months passed. (MOVE’s $26 million civil suit against the city in connection with the March 28 death of Life Africa and other alleged police brutalities was dismissed during this period when the standoff prevented MOVE members from attending a hearing.)</p>
<p>Various community mediators tried to broker a deal between the city and MOVE to end the standoff, but MOVE’s demand for the release of Sue Africa and the three MOVE members sentenced to prison by Judge Ribner always brought these discussions to an impasse</p>
<p>The now nearly yearlong standoff was a major PR loser for the macho mayor. In March 1978, Rizzo decided to starve MOVE out by ordering the water and electricity to the MOVE house cut off and the police to set up numerous sandbagged sniper posts. “Police covered a truck with sandbags, armed it with machine guns, and pulled it up before MOVE headquarters. They stationed sharpshooters in the surrounding buildings. This development heightened the crisis and precipitated a new flurry of intermediary efforts,” reported Hizkias Assefa and Paul Wahrhaftig in their book <em>The MOVE Crisis in Philadelphia: Extremist Groups and Conflict Resolution</em> published in 1990. The police established checkpoints, sealing off a four-block area. Rizzo boasted that the perimeter was so tight "a fly couldn't get through."</p>
<p>With bullhorns and loudspeakers at the Poweltown house, MOVE members mocked the city government for spending thousands of dollars a day on police overtime just to stand around and listen to MOVE decry the police and spew revolutionary rant. The media reveled in the street theater, making the Rizzo vs. MOVE confrontation a staple of daily news coverage.</p>
<p>For the next two months, the city’s quarantine of MOVE continued with great inconvenience to the neighbors who were now forced to drive around blockades and show I.D. coming and going to their homes. <em>The Philadelphia Daily News</em> reported that city spending for police overtime had passed the $1 million mark. Area residents held a massive demonstration on Sunday, April 4, 1978, when several thousand ringed City Hall to protest the police blockade at the MOVE house. Rizzo had accomplished the near impossible in making MOVE the object of public sympathy.</p>
<p>With a nudge from the Carter administration to end the stalemate, the city’s managing director, Hillel Levinson, announced a 10-point agreement in early May that had been brokered with MOVE counsel Oscar N. Gaskins. Judge Fred DiBona, City Solicitor Sheldon Albert, and Gaskins signed the 10-point agreement. “MOVE agreed to turn over its remaining weapons and allow police to search the Powelton compound,” Anderson and Hevenor detailed in their book <em>Burning Down the House</em>. “In return, 18 MOVE members, charged with felonies and misdemeanors, would be freed from jail on their own recognizance. The MOVE organization would then have a 90-day grace period – or until midnight, Aug. 1, 1978 – to vacate 307-309 N. 33<sup>rd</sup> Street entirely. At that point, all outstanding charges would be dropped against the [18-released] MOVE members.” MOVE also agreed to dismantle the platform at the front of the house within two weeks, to remove its animals, and to cease dumping garbage in its backyard. The city agreed to assist MOVE in obtaining replacement housing.</p>
<p>No mention in the agreement was made of MOVE’s three “political prisoners” – Jerry, Conrad, and Robert Africa. Their release “had been accomplished by an oral arrangement and had already been carried out as a precondition to MOVE’s assent to the May 5 agreement,” according to the authors of <em>The MOVE Crisis in Philadelphia</em>.</p>
<p>Implementation of the agreement began that day with the police searching the MOVE compound with metal detectors. When only inoperable weapons were found, the barricades and roadblocks surrounding the area were pulled open. A May 24 news article in the <em>Inquirer</em> reported that health inspectors had found the MOVE house to be clean.</p>
<p>In gaining the release of its political prisoners, MOVE thought it had felled Goliath without hurling a stone. MOVE’s interpretation of the agreement, based on oral understandings shuttled back and forth between the city and MOVE during the negotiations of the settlement agreement, was that all charges against each of the 21 recently released MOVE members would be dropped pending the successful relocation of MOVE members to a different location. In fact, during the 90-day grace period D.A. Rendell’s office began taking actions to bring some of those MOVE members to trial in connection with the May 20, 1977 standoff with police. MOVE saw this as a double cross.</p>
<p>When the city pressed MOVE to tear down its fence, get rid of all of its animals except for a few puppies, and turn over its loudspeakers to the police, MOVE did not comply. "As soon as the city knew MOVE had no guns or explosives, they began modifying and restating the terms of the agreement," the pamphlet states. "It soon became apparent that D.A. Rendell's promise to dispose of all pending MOVE cases within four-to-six weeks was a blatant lie. The 90-day time period, which had been described to MOVE as a working timetable, was misrepresented to the media as an absolute deadline. The promise to assist MOVE in finding a new place to live was never completed, and the city began demanding that the house be razed."</p>
<p>The city did offer MOVE five dilapidated houses in all-black North Philadelphia. “At least one of the five North Philadelphia houses offered to MOVE for taking rental for $1 a year has been declared unfit for human habitation,” the <em>Philadelphia Daily News</em> stated in an editorial dated April 4, 1978, noting that the other four were “run-down properties.” The <em>Daily News</em> found this quite odd. “The ludicrous thing is that the city is trying to drive the MOVE people out of this property [the Powelton compound] on the claim that it is unfit for human habitation.”</p>
<p>At an Aug. 2, 1978 hearing – the day after the 90-day deadline for MOVE to vacate its Powelton compound – that quickly turned intemperate and would lead to MOVE attorney Gaskins being jailed for contempt of court, Judge DiBona ruled that MOVE was in violation of the 90-day deadline to vacate the Powelton house. He proceeded to sign bench warrants for 21 MOVE members, regardless of where they happened to live. This action would set in motion the horrific seize of the Powelton compound within the week.</p>
<p>At dawn on Aug. 8 hundreds of police in flak jackets and riot helmets surrounded the MOVE house. Inside were 12 MOVE adults and 11 children, some of them infants. Over MOVE’s loudspeakers, Chuck Africa stated: “Testing, motherfuckers, testing. You’re trying to kill breastfeeding mothers and breastfeeding children. We’re not backing down. If you want us out, you’ll have to bring us out dead.” Other MOVE speakers asked if the police had their life insurance policies paid up, warning that there would be “lots of widows.”</p>
<p>At 6:04 a.m. George Fencl, head of the Civil Affairs Bureau, announced over a bullhorn, “You have exactly two minutes in which to come out.” A MOVE member responded: “The gate’s open. Stop playin’ games.” Fencl then said, “Come out. No one will hurt you.” He then handed the bullhorn to longtime community activist Monsignor Charles Devlin of the Cardinal’s Commission on Human Relations to make his plea: “Come on out. No one’s going to get hurt. Let me come in, and I’ll walk out with you.”</p>
<p>“Fuck you, priest,” was the reply, according to Anderson and Hevenor.</p>
<p>Police then rolled in specially modified construction vehicles and tore down the fence and smashed out the windows of the house. Just before 7 a.m. MOVE was notified by bullhorn: "Uniformed officers will enter your house for the purpose of taking each of you into custody. Any resistance or use of force will be met with force." In the next hour about 30 flak-jacketed police entered and searched the three-story house, determining that all 23 MOVE members were barricaded in the basement. As firefighters began prying off the boarded up basement windows, they saw a gun sticking out of a basement window. Deputy Police Commissioner Morton Solomon ordered the firefighters to blast water into the basement, flushing the basement with hundreds of gallons of water in minutes.</p>
<p>With the police still in the house and with firefighters just outside it, gunshots suddenly rang out about 8:15 a.m., setting off a torrent of bullets from the police sniper posts into the house. During the 90-second period of sustained gunfire, Officer James Ramp was fatally wounded. Four other police and four firefighters were also shot. For the next half hour, firefighters pumped more water into the basement, raising the standing water level in the basement to several feet. Finally, a MOVE woman and three naked small children climbed out of a front basement window and walked toward the police.</p>
<p>In the next few minutes, all of the remaining MOVE members, except Delbert Orr Africa, climbed out of the front of the house and surrendered. When Delbert, the nominal head of MOVE since John Africa went underground to avoid arrest, crawled out a side window and raised his arms up in a posture of surrender, he was about to become the only MOVE member seriously injured during the ordeal. With one police officer pointing a rifle at his chin, Officer Joseph Zagame smashed him in the face with his police helmet and Officer Lawrence D'Ulisse struck him in the chest with the butt of a rifle, knocking him to the ground. Police then dragged Delbert by his dreadlocks across the street where other officers kicked him in the head, kidneys and groin.</p>
<p>Immediately following the arrests the police version of the events was that MOVE had fired the first shot and that no beatings had accompanied the arrests. The police were forced to abandon the second part of their claims when later that day local TV news broadcasts began airing videotaped footage of Delbert Africa's brutal arrest. Philadelphians were duly shocked. (The resulting public outcry forced the D.A.'s office to impanel a special grand jury, which eventually handed down indictments against three police officers, but no trial would be held for another two-and-a-half years.)</p>
<p>The police claim that MOVE had fired the first shot also came into immediate dispute. Radio reporters Richard Maloney and Larry Rosen both recalled hearing the first shot come from a house diagonally across the street where they said they saw an arm holding a pistol out of a second-story window. Most of the reporters at the scene, though, reported that the first shot came from a basement window of the MOVE compound. The next day, police interviewed three of the 11 MOVE children. An 8-year-old MOVE girl told them all MOVE adults had guns, a 5-year-old boy said he saw Phil, Eddie, Delbert, Janet, and Merle fire their guns – and that MOVE adults were the first to shoot.</p>
<p>Although the death of Officer Ramp had caused the MOVE house to be a murder scene, the compound would be bulldozed that day by noon. Crushed in the debris was a wooden sign that read, “Long Live the House That John Africa Built.”</p>
<p>Later that afternoon, Abu-Jamal attended Mayor Rizzo’s news conference at City Hall. Rizzo blamed the “new breed of journalism” for the death of Officer Ramp and then, in response to a question from Abu-Jamal, said, “They believe what you write, what you say. And it’s got to stop. And one day, and I hope it’s in my career, that you’re going to have to be held responsible and accountable for what you do.”</p>
<p>All 12 MOVE adults arrested on Aug. 8 were charged with the murder of Officer Ramp, as well as attempted murder, conspiracy, and aggravated and simple assault.</p>
<p>At a preliminary hearing, MOVE’s court-appointed lawyers entered a motion to dismiss the charges based on destruction of evidence, arguing that the destruction of the house prevented MOVE from proving that it was impossible for any MOVE member to have shot Ramp. Judge Merna Marshal denied that petition and held the defendants over for trial. Prior to trial, prosecutors dismissed charges against two of the defendants who agreed to disavow MOVE.</p>
<p>When the remaining nine MOVE defendants all elected self-representation, the court appointed separate backup counsel for each. The hearings for pre-trial motions would last more than a year, and frequently provide raucous and uproarious street theater. The media feasted on every twist and turn, and played up every confrontation between the unruly MOVE defendants and the prosecution.</p>
<p>The non-jury trial – presided over by Common Pleas Judge Edwin Malmed – would not begin until Dec. 10, 1979 and go on for the next five months, becoming the longest trial in Philadelphia history. Nearly 100 witnesses would testify, about 200 exhibits would be introduced, and there would be 300 defense motions for dismissal.</p>
<p>One of the first prosecution witnesses was Chief Inspector George Fencl, head of the Civil Affairs Bureau, a police official MOVE considered to be Rizzo's main architect in the plot to eliminate it. MOVE defendants cross-examined Fencl for four days until Judge Malmed ordered the witness excused. On Friday, Jan. 18, Judge Malmed removed all defendants from the courtroom for disorderly behavior, ordering their backup attorneys to take over the case. Each Monday after that, according to Anderson and Hevenor, “the MOVE defendants were taken into court and again asked to pledge to obey the judge’s orders.” They never did and were never allowed to be present during the trial again.</p>
<p>Eight defense witnesses, including several reporters, neighbors, and one of the negotiators, testified that the first shot fired had been fired from outside the MOVE compound, contradicting earlier prosecution testimony from various police officers that the first shot was fired from the basement of the MOVE house.</p>
<p>In closing arguments held on May 5, the various court-appointed MOVE attorneys urged the judge to weigh just how circumstantial the evidence in this case was: no fingerprints on the weapons the police claimed to have recovered from the house, no ballistics to prove that Officer Ramp was killed by a bullet fired from the compound, and no eyewitness testimony of anyone claiming to have seen a MOVE member shoot Ramp. How could the judge even consider convicting nine people for the murder of one man who had only been shot once?</p>
<p>It took Judge Malmed just three days to reach his verdict. The 68-year-old jurist pronounced Delbert Orr Africa, Janine Phillips Africa, William Phillips Africa, Deborah Sims Africa, Chuck Sims Africa, Michael Davis Africa, Janet Holloway Africa, Merle Austin Africa, and Edward Goodman Africa guilty of third-degree murder, conspiracy, and multiple counts of attempted murder and aggravated assault. On August 4, Judge Malmed sentenced each defendant to 30 to100 years in state prison. Consuela Dotson Africa, who refused to disavow MOVE, was later sentenced in a separate trial to 10-20 years by Judge Levy Anderson, who added on another three-and-a-half years for contempt. (Dotson was paroled in 1994. Merle Austin Africa died in prison in 2000. The other seven became eligible for parole in 2008.)</p>
<p>After the trial, when Judge Malmed was asked on a radio call-in program who actually fired the fatal shot that killed Officer Ramp, the judge, according to Bisson, replied, “I haven’t the faintest idea. They call themselves a family. I sentenced them as a family.”</p>
<p>The trial of the three police officers indicted for brutalizing the now convicted Delbert Africa would not be held until 1981. D.A. Rendell’s office brought to trial Officers Zagame, Charles Geiest and Terrance Mulvihill on assault charges. (No charges were brought against Officer D’Ulisse who was photographed wielding the rifle butt.) Attorneys for the D.A.’s office presented photographic evidence of these police officers assaulting Delbert Africa. Just before the jury was to start its deliberations, Judge Stanley Kubacki ordered the jury dismissed and the officers acquitted. (Geist would be shot by his police officer wife during a “domestic dispute” three months after his acquittal, go into a coma and die eight months later. Mulvihill would commit suicide in 1989.)</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Topics:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/innocence-cases" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Innocence Cases</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/justice-issues" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Justice Issues</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Authors:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">J. Patrick O&#039;Connor</a></div></div></div>Mon, 02 Jun 2014 19:23:52 +0000admin1625 at http://www.crimemagazine.comhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/framing-mumia-abu-jamal-1#commentsA Tribute to Shawn R. Griffithhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/tribute-shawn-r-griffith
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><strong><img style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto; display: block;" alt="" src="http://www.crimemagazine.com/sites/default/files/Shawn_Griffith.jpg" /></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>January 5, 1971 – May 3, 2014 </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">by <a href="http://crimemagazine.com/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" rel="nofollow">J. Patrick O’Connor</a> </span></p>
<p>In the preface to his amazing book on prison reform, <a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/098593400X" rel="nofollow"><em>Facing the U.S. Prison Problem 2.3 Million Strong: an Ex-Con’s View of the Mistakes and the Solutions</em></a>, Shawn <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;">Ramey</span> Griffith wrote, “By the time many people read this after it has been published for five or ten years [the book was published in 2012], unless I receive some very good medical treatment, there is a good chance that I will be deceased. I do not feel another 20 years of life left within me. The system literally sucked the life out of me through stress, inadequate medical care, substandard nutrition, and callous treatment. It damaged my heart (for which I now take medication), my brain, and my nervous system. I have been stabbed, beaten, maced, confined, robbed, threatened, bacterially infected, and medically neglected so many times that I am worn out.” He was 41 when he wrote that and had been out of prison for only a few months.</p>
<p>On May 3, 2014, at 4:40 a.m. Shawn was found dead in his cell at the Manatee County jail in Palmetto, Florida, an apparent victim of suicide by hanging.</p>
<p>After over 23 years in prison, he was dropped back in a world that wanted little or nothing to do with an ex-con. In the two years since his conditional release from state prison, Shawn had a lived a whirlwind. In many ways, particularly when it came to women and making ends meet, he was overwhelmed. He precipitously married right away and was soon separated. When it became apparent that he could only find odd jobs at minimum wage, he set himself up as an independent contractor to paint houses. It was a major struggle to make a go of it but after a year of basic futility he landed a $30,000 painting contract at an apartment complex. Just when things were looking up, disaster struck..</p>
<p>He was arrested in Bradenton on February 6, 2014 on charges of burglary and arson and sent to the Manatee County jail. He called me numerous times from jail over the next three months. The first time he called he spoke so softly I could hardly hear him. He was ashamed of himself for his bad judgment. A young woman he was dating at the time turned out to be a heroin addict. He told me she had burglarized the house of her former boyfriend and set it on fire. When she was arrested she told the police Shawn was responsible. Both of them ended up being charged.</p>
<p>As a person on conditional release, the arrest was a violation of his parole. Even if acquitted of the charge – the trial was not scheduled until December – Shawn was sure he would be sent back to prison to serve the remaining three years of his sentence. If he was convicted, he expected to spend the remainder of his life in prison.</p>
<p><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/098593400X" rel="nofollow"><img style="float: right;" alt="" src="http://crimemagazine.com/images/Facing_The_Prison_Problem.jpg" width="200" /></a>He told me there was no way, particularly after writing the book he did exposing the malfeasance and corruption in the Florida penal system, that he would return to prison. So when a friend of his called me the day after his body was discovered to say he had committed suicide I was shocked but not entirely surprised.</p>
<p>Just as Shawn Griffith was an extraordinary person, he was extraordinarily unlucky. When he was released from prison in 2007 he was a model candidate for conditional parole. At age 21 he had been sentenced to 22 years in prison for flashing a gun and robbing a man of $30. He robbed to support his crack addiction, a lifestyle he adopted at age 16. Over a 14-year period in numerous state prisons he took over 40 accredited correspondence courses with emphasis on criminal justice, psychology, and marketing. From Ohio University he earned an assosicate's college degree and carried a grade point average of 3.5. All that time he also volunteered his time as an adult basic education teacher to hundreds of inmates. He was fully rehabilitated and ready to start a new life.</p>
<p>Seven weeks into his release he was making his way, working a full-time job and passing each of his weekly drug screens. With his family, he attended church services every Sunday. Then the bottom fell out. One night when he returned home an hour after his 7 p.m. curfew – he had been at a job interview – his parole officer was waiting for him. She did not care that he had just been offered a job as a data processor that paid $32,000 a year. She sent in the paperwork that revoked his release and Shawn was sent back to prison to serve the final six years of his original sentence.</p>
<p>What was so extraordinary about Shawn was what he had overcome. The thought and research he put into writing <em>Facing the U.S. Prison Problem 2.3 Million Strong</em> represented a monumental accomplishment for someone who had dropped out of school at age 12 and spent over 23 years in some of the worst run prisons in the United States where no thought – only lip service – was ever given to rehabilitation.</p>
<p>Crime Magazine was proud to excerpt his book. On January 14, 2013 we published his article “Drugs Inside U.S. Prisons” and on April 8, 2013 his article “Solitary Confinement in Jails and Prisons.” Like his book, the articles demonstrated that there are few people writing today with the knowledge and facility Shawn brought to bear on important prison issues. This big hulk of a man with a shaved head and quiet demeanor was full of compassion and empathy. He was a true believer in righting wrongs.</p>
<p>In the final chapter of his book he ends with a section entitled “A Final Word to Convicts – Do Not Give Up.” He writes, “God willing, one day you will get out and there will be people who aid you in the process. But you know as well as I do that the real challenge is to remain focused on where you’re going now and where you want to be in 10 years. As ex-convicts, we can be our own greatest friends or our own greatest deceivers. Our futures are truly in our own hands.”</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"> </p>
<h1 style="text-align: center;" id="watch-headline-title" class="yt"><span dir="ltr" id="eow-title" class="watch-title long-title yt-uix-expander-head" title="One Person, One Big Difference: An Interview with Shawn Griffith"><span style="font-size: small;">One Person, One Big Difference: An Interview with Shawn Griffith</span> </span></h1>
<p><iframe style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto; display: block;" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/s-ax71-fDwY?rel=0" frameborder="0" width="420"></iframe></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Authors:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">J. Patrick O&#039;Connor</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/authors/shawn-griffith" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Shawn Griffith</a></div></div></div>Mon, 05 May 2014 23:21:45 +0000admin1614 at http://www.crimemagazine.comhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/tribute-shawn-r-griffith#commentsBook ‘Em Vol. 41http://www.crimemagazine.com/book-%E2%80%98em-vol-41
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/510iF9wqt%2BL.jpg" alt="" height="300" /></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Crime Magazine's Choice of True Crime Books </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">by <a href="http://crimemagazine.com/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" rel="nofollow">J. Patrick O’Connor</a></span></p>
<p><em><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51OBr6BX%2BVL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="71" /><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/0425263649" rel="nofollow">The Yoga Store Murder: The Shocking True Account of the Lululemon Athletica Killing</a></em> by Dan Morse (Berkeley Books, 2013). Jayna Murray, the 30-year-old manager of the trendy lululemon athletica store in upscale Bethesda, Maryland, was found murdered in the store on October 12, 2001. She had been slashed, stabbed and struck more than 300 times. Her assistant, 28-year-old Brittany Norwood, was found alive, tied up on the bathroom floor. Her clothing was ripped and she had facial lacerations. She told the police that two masked men had entered the store just after closing and attacked them. To veteran homicide detective Jim Drewry the story Norwood told and her lack of serious wounds didn’t add up. Morse, a crime reporter for the <em>Washington Post</em> since 2008, reported on the case from start to finish. The book goes step-by-step through the meticulous police investigation that leads to Norwood’s conviction of first-degree murder and a sentence of life.</p>
<p><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/1606351931" rel="nofollow"><em><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51R7Awy8DhL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="82" />Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-Step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping</em></a> by Richard T. Cahill Jr. (Kent State University Press, 2014). No kidnapping in U.S. history has generated more public interest than that of the Lindbergh baby in 1932. Over the years numerous books have advanced various contradictory theories about the celebrated case. Some have gone as far as positing that Charles Lindbergh himself killed his own son and fabricated the kidnapping to cover his tracks. For many of those authors the composition of the ladder used in the kidnapping has been at the center the controversy over Bruno Hauptmann’s conviction. Hauptmann’s many defenders contend the police planted the slats on the ladder to frame him, ignoring the other pieces of evidence, such as the ransom money in his possession, to make their case. Richard Cahill, a former assistant district attorney and criminal defense lawyer, debunks each claim that points to a police conspiracy, using the slats on the ladder as the centerpiece of his case against the German carpenter who had illegally entered the United States in 1923.</p>
<p><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/161614923X" rel="nofollow"><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/510iF9wqt%2BL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="81" /></a><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/161614923X" rel="nofollow">The <em>Mob and the City: The Hidden History of How the Mafia Captured New York</em></a> by C. Alexander Hortis (Prometheus Books, 2014). A definitive examination of how the Mafia came to dominate organized crime in New York City during the 1930s through 1950s. Gaining control of the Port of New York was the key element in the Mafia’s rise to power. In 1880, 95 percent of the longshoremen were Irish; 20 years later one-third were Italian, usually of Sicilian origin. By 1930, the Sicilians were in the majority on the docks. From there Costa Nostra took root and the Five Families became embedded in all forms of organized crime throughout the city. Hortis finds that it was the mob’s foot soldiers rather than its godfathers who forged Cosa Nostra, capturing New York by becoming part of it. By the 1950s the Mafia families had grown to include 2,000 “made men” and thousands more criminal associates entrenched throughout the economy, neighborhoods, and nightlife of New York. The book covers such topics as: Who founded the modern Mafia? Who shot Albert Anastasia at the Park Sheraton barbershop? And who was present at the infamous meeting of the Mafia in Apalachin, New York?</p>
<p><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/1621572072" rel="nofollow"><em><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51I6yFTgSgL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="83" />Hunting the President: Threats, Plots, and Assassination Attempts from FDR to Obama </em></a>by Mel Ayton (Regnery Publishing, 2014). Mel Ayton chronicles the scores of assassination attempts made against U.S. presidents since the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Taking one president at a time, the book presents a series of case studies of presidential attackers, plotters and threateners. As with all of his other books, Ayton's research is wide and deep. This book is based on archived interviews with Secret Service agents, U.S. presidents and their family members; oral histories from presidential libraries; congressional reports; the published memoirs of Secret Service agents; police profiles; FBI files; government agency reports, newspaper archives, and court records. The book is an amazing and disturbing account of a subset of U.S. citizens who, regardless of who happens to be president, desire to kill the incumbent. Almost all of these people are lonely and alienated -- not moved by political fervor -- who see assassination as a way to settle a score for a real or imagined grievance. Another major motivator is fame or at least infamy. In his research, Ayton discovered an extraordinary array of cases that did not gain public attention even as they rang alarm bells at the highest levels of the government. In many cases the threat was quite real but the Secret Service, wary of "copycat" perpetrators, kept many of these attempts under wraps. Such was the case in the spring of 1963 when President Kennedy was approached by a man with a gun during a stop at a high school in Nashville. Secret Service agents tackled the man before he could take a shot. Back in 1954, when war hero Dwight Eisenhower was president, the Secret Service estimated that "every six hours someone in the United States made a threat against the president or his family." FDR, in particular, stirred deep resentment. Of the 40,000 letters a month sent to him at the White House each month, 5,000 of them contained threats on his life. In the period between 1949-1950, the Secret Service investigated 1,925 threats against President Truman's life. During the first year of the Korean War, the threats doubled. By his last year in office, the threats had grown to 3,000. President Nixon evaded six extremely serious assassination attempts, including one from Arthur Bremer who stalked Nixon in Ottawa, Canada in April of 1972 for three days. Foiled there, Bremer attempted to assassinate Gov. George Wallace the next month. By 1978, when Jimmy Carter was president, the Secret Service was processing more than 14,000 cases of threats against him. Of the 406 arrests that resulted, 311 led to convictions and prison time for the offenders.</p>
<p>One potential assassin was sentenced to 40 years for trying to kill President Clinton. After 9/11, George W. Bush became the most-guarded president in U.S. history. The election in 2008 of Barack Obama brought an unprecedented level of threats against the nation's first black president both at home and abroad. Anders Breivik, who would go on a mass-murdering spree at a summer camp in Norway, plotted to assassinate President Obama at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo in 2009. For U.S. history buffs, <em>Hunting the President</em> will open an entirely new area of<br /> Americana.</p>
<p><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41%2BafSYcP1L._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="78" /><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/B00G8ULNX4" rel="nofollow"><em>The Great Heist: The Story of the Biggest Bank Robbery in History </em></a>by Jeff McArthur (Bandwagon Books, 2014). Two minutes after the Lincoln National Bank opened for business at 10 a.m. on September 17, 1930 five men wearing dark business suits, carrying red and white sacks in one hand and guns in the other, entered. They ordered the dozen customers already in the bank and the bank’s employees to lie down on the lobby’s floor. Eight minutes later the men emerged with more than $2.7 million in cash and securities – the largest take of any bank heist in history. The book covers the search for the bandits, the trials that followed, and the incredible story of how authorities – with an assist from Al Capone – got almost all of the money back.</p>
<p><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515jh91foHL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="84" /><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/1616149272" rel="nofollow"><em>Villains, Scoundrels, and Rogues: Incredible True Tales of Mischief and Mayhem</em></a> by Paul Martin (Prometheus Books, 2014). This is a fun read with a lot of interesting, generally unknown or forgotten characters. Here you’ll meet President Lincoln’s missing bodyguard; Maggie and Kate Fox, the celebrated founders in the mid 19<sup>th</sup> century of the Spiritualism movement who were finally found to be frauds; Hetty Green, the value investor who became the first woman to earn a fortune on the stock market and who came to be known in the late 19<sup>th</sup> century as the “Witch of Wall Street”; Herbert Bridgman, a Brooklyn newspaperman who accompanied Robert E. Perry on several expeditions to Greenland and who would champion that cause that Perry, not Dr. Frederick A. Cook, was the first to reach the North Pole when the great explorer made it there in 1909; Peggy Hopkins Joyce, the consummate gold digger of the Roaring 20s.; and best of all Titanic Thompson, hustler par excellence, the man who would wager on anything and won millions doing so only to die broke at age 81, but what a run of notoriety he had from the 1920s through the 1940s.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Topics:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/topics/crime-books-and-films" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Crime Books and Films</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Authors:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">J. Patrick O&#039;Connor</a></div></div></div>Mon, 05 May 2014 20:20:25 +0000admin1613 at http://www.crimemagazine.comhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/book-%E2%80%98em-vol-41#commentsThe Boston Marathon Bombingshttp://www.crimemagazine.com/boston-marathon-bombings
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p style="text-align: center;"><em><img src="http://www.crimemagazine.com/sites/default/files/bombing-suspects.jpg" alt="" width="350" /></em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em>The Boston Marathon bombings were the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since the World Trade Center catastrophe on September 11, 2001. That the suspected bombers are immigrants of Chechen heritage who had been nurtured for over a decade in Cambridge made it all the worse. </em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">by <a href="http://crimemagazine.com/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" rel="nofollow">J. Patrick O’Connor</a></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he conditions were ideal for the 117<sup>th</sup> running of the Boston Marathon. Under partly sunny skies, with the temperature in the 50s and minimum wind, the most venerable of all U.S. races began shortly after 9 a.m. on April 15, 2013. Some 23,342 starters, representing 92 countries, converged in waves at the starting line at Hopkinton Green. The elite women went off at 9:32 a.m., followed at 10 a.m. by the elite men. By noon over a half-million spectators lined the fabled course.</p>
<p>A year after the modern Olympics resumed in Athens in 1896, John Graham, a member of the Boston Athletic Association and the team manager for the inaugural U.S. Olympic team, organized the running of the first Boston Marathon. Fifteen runners participated in the inaugural race, with 10 finishing. The Boston Athletic Association, which still runs the event, set the date as April 19 in honor of Patriot’s Day – a regional holiday commemorating the beginning of the Revolutionary War when shots “heard ‘round the world” were fired at Lexington and Concord on April 19,1775. If Patriot’s Day fell on a Sunday, the marathon was moved to the following Monday. In 1969, Patriot’s Day was officially designated to be the third Monday of April.</p>
<p>For the first 12 years the marathon consisted of 24.5 miles from Irvington Oval in Boston to Metcalf’s Mill in Ashland. In 1908, to comply with Olympic standards, the marathon’s distance was increased to its current length of 26.2 miles. The route was basically reversed, beginning now at Hopkinton Green and ending at Copley Square in the heart of downtown Boston, alongside the Boston Public Library and Trinity Church.The course follows winding roads on various state routes through Boston’s western suburbs of Ashland, Framingham, Natick, reaching its half-way point at Wellesley College, where hundreds of co-eds cheer on the runners through “Scream Tunnel.” From there the course begins its ascent, covering the four hills of Newton that culminate in Heartbreak Hill, a span that runs for four-tenths of a mile between mile 20 and 21. The last five miles weave through Brookline and into Boston where the route then turns left onto Beacon Street continuing to Kenmore Square, and then follows Commonwealth Avenue inbound. The course turns right onto Hereford Street – against normal traffic flow – then left onto Boylston Street, finishing near the John Hancock Tower in Copley Square.</p>
<p><strong>The Bombings</strong></p>
<p>Long after the winners and elite runners had crossed the finished line, thousands of marathoners were still on the course; over 5,500 runners had yet to make it to the half way marker, but a steady trickle of runners appooached the finish line. And then the unthinkable happened: A home-made bomb exploded at 2:49:43 p.m. on the left side of the finish line, followed 13 seconds later by a second detonation. The bombs were hidden inside dark nylon backpacks that were deposited about 100 yards apart on the sidewalk. The bombs – designed to kill and maim – were housed in ordinary kitchen pressure cookers, filled with nails, ball bearings, BBs, and black powder – triggered by egg timers.</p>
<p>The blasts were so powerful that debris could be found 12 city blocks away.</p>
<p><img style="float: right;" src="http://crimemagazine.com/images/Boston_Marathon_Bombing.jpg" alt="" width="300" />Despite the fact that there could have been a number of more bombs set to go off in short intervals, many of the people around the finish line, including some of the runners, ran toward the carnage and danger instead of away from it. Bystanders were seen immediately kneeling on the pavement, removing belts or bits of clothing to fashion makeshift tourniquets to stanch the bleeding of numerous people who would have otherwise bled to death before help could arrive. One runner, a pediatric resident who was approaching the finish line, jumped over police barricades to aid the victims. These quick, decisive, brave actions undoubtedly saved numerous victims from bleeding to death before professional medics arrived.</p>
<p>The medical tent directly behind the finish line – set up to treat dehydrated runners – was instantly transformed into a triage station. Within minutes, ambulances arrived to treat the most grievously wounded and ferry them to nearby hospitals – all of which were now on full alert and prepared to receive mass casualties. Some of the wounded would be in surgery within a half hour of the explosions.</p>
<p>Three persons were killed by the blast and over 260 were wounded. Fatally injured were Martin Richard, an 8-year-old who was at the finish line with his mother and sister, both of whom were gravely injured; Krystal Campbell, 29, of Arlington, a restaurant manager who rarely missed attending the marathon; and Lu Lingzi, a 23-year-old Chinese graduate student at Boston University. The injured ranged in age from 7 to 71. Doctors performed 18 amputations on 16 victims – half of the amputations were above the knee. “It sounds grotesque, but if could imagine, it’s like putting your leg into a garbage disposal,” said Dr. William Creevy, an orthopedic surgeon at Boston Medical Center where five amputations were performed.</p>
<p>One of the above-knee amputees, 35-year-old Marc Fucarile, a delivery truck driver from Stoneham, Massachusetts, said the burns he sustained on his remaining leg are so painful that he thinks life would be easier if he had lost it too.</p>
<p>“Many victims survived with injuries that might well have killed them were in not for an army of medical professionals and quick-thinking volunteers at the marathon finish line – and several top notch hospitals nearby,”<em>The Wall Street Journal</em> reported on April 29.</p>
<p><strong>The Hunt for the Terrorists</strong></p>
<p>It would be difficult to imagine that whoever placed these bombs had any intention of going undetected. The finish line during a Boston Marathon is one of the most photographed and tightly cropped areas in the world. In addition to all the cellphones, TV station cameras, and digital cameras recording and memorializing the marathon, many of the retail establishments in the area provide 24-hour closed-circuit TV coverage. It would only be a matter of time before police investigators reviewed these surveillance tapes and spotted something out of the ordinary. </p>
<p>There were over 13,000 videos and 120,000 still photos taken during the marathon, most of these by people with cellphones as the runners entered Boylston Street heading for the finish line. Thousands of these images were flown to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia. Twenty-four hours after the bombing, one of the injured bystanders, Jeff Bauman, told police when he stabilized after double-amputation surgery that he had stood next to someone he thought was one of the bombers and gave a description.</p>
<p>By Wednesday morning, the FBI had photo images of two bombing suspects, but no idea who either one was.One photo showed the men standing together – one wearing a white cap and the other a black one. What the videos and photos showed were two young men entering Boylston Street, coming from Gloucester Street, at 2:38 p.m. toting black backpacks. These two were designated by the FBI and the police at “Bomber No. 1” and “Bomber No. 2.”</p>
<table style="width: 200px;" cellpadding="3" align="right" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><img src="http://crimemagazine.com/images/bombing-suspects.jpg" alt="" width="200" /></td>
</tr><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Bombing Suspects (Photo released by the FBI)</span></td>
</tr></tbody></table><p>Video from a Lord &amp; Taylor department store camera showed Bomber No. 2 wearing a white baseball cap turned backward. At 2:42 p.m. the video camera at the Forum restaurant shows Bomber No. 1 walking past, in the direction of the finish line. At 2:45 p.m. Bomber No. 2 is taped in front of the Forum restaurant placing his backpack on the sidewalk. He is shown remaining in place for about four minutes, occasionally checking his cellphone and even appearing to take a picture with it. Then he seems to check his cellphone again, speaking into it.</p>
<p>A few seconds after he finished the call, the large crowd of people around him can be seen reacting to the first explosion about 100 yards away. The first bomb was placed outside of a Lens Crafters shop. It blew out the store’s windows, two windows directly above and the ground floor windows of the Marathon Sports store next door. Many victims in this area suffered injuries to the backs of their legs as they viewed the finish line from behind a security fence.</p>
<p>Everyone in the crowd outside the Forum restaurant, other than Bomber No. 2, turns to the east – toward the finish line – and stares in shock and alarm at the carnage unfolding. Bomber No. 2 is then shown walking away in the opposite direction without his backpack. As he makes his way toward Fairfield Street, one of the marathon runners who had finished the race snaps a photo of him in his white cap worn backwards. Seconds after that the second bomb explodes outside the Forum restaurant.</p>
<p>The Boston police and FBI debated whether to release the images of the two suspect bombers to the public, with the FBI against it on the grounds that it would alert the suspects to flee, and the Boston police commissioner, Ed Davis, arguing for the release on grounds of public safety. Davis was afraid the two would set off other bombs in Boston if not apprehended. The debate was not settled until the FBI agreed to release the images to the media around 5 p.m. on Thursday. From his hospital bed, Jeff Bauman informed the police that one of the men pictured – the one in the black cap – was the man he saw. </p>
<p>Every TV station in Boston and all the cable news networks rushed to display the photos of the two bombing suspects and urging anyone who recognized the suspects to call the police. The coverage was incessant. Shortly after the photos began airing, Robel Phillipos, a student at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth was on the phone talking with fellow student Dias Kadybayev when he saw a photo of another student, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, flash on the screen. After he told Kadybayev about the resemblance, Kadybayev texted Tsarnaev that he looked like one of the bombers. “LOL,” Tsarnaev texted back. “If you need something in my room, take it.”</p>
<p>Kadybayev and two other friends went to Tsarnaev’s dorm room. His roommate told them he had left several hours earlier. As they waited for him to return they watched a movie. One of them spotted Tsarnaev’s backpack and noticed it contained fireworks mortars that had been emptied of their powder. With the empty mortars clearly implicating Tsarnaev, Kadybayev and friends went into cover-up mode, taking the backpack and Tsarnaev’s computer to Kadybayev’s off-campus apartment. The backpack was tossed into a dumpster there.</p>
<p><strong>Catching Themselves</strong></p>
<p>Five hours after the FBI released photos of the bombing suspects, MIT campus police officer Sean Collier was shot to death from behind as he sat in his patrol car waiting for his shift to end 30 minutes later at 11 p.m. The apparent motive of the attack was to steal the 27-year-old officer’s gun which was secured in a triple-lock holster the assailants could not force open.</p>
<p>No one knew if the murder of the MIT officer was related to the Boston Marathon bombers, but the killing of a police officer brought scores of police from around the metro area to Cambridge. Just before midnight a 911 call reported a carjacking, claiming the hijackers were the marathon bombers. A man with a gun had forced the driver of a Mercedes SUV to drive to another location where another man awaited. The two men then loaded something into the trunk. Back inside the car, the two men took $45 and a bank card from the driver and told him to drive to a Shell gas station nearby. When the two men went into the gas station’s food mart, the driver fled on foot across the street to a Mobil gas station, rushed through the door and yelled, “Call the police. They have bombs. They have a gun. They want to kill me.”</p>
<p>The Mobil store attendant thought the man was drunk, but when the man ran behind the counter and into a back storage room and locked himself in, the attendant knew he was serious and dialed 911.</p>
<p>“I tried not to look outside at anything,” the attendant, Tarek Ahmed, said. “I wanted it to appear as if nothing was wrong. I was hoping the suspects didn’t see where he went. At the same time, I told the police what happened. As I’m talking to the police, I back up slowing and knock on the storage room door, and I handed him the phone.”</p>
<table style="width: 200px;" cellpadding="3" align="right" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><img src="http://crimemagazine.com/images/Boston_Marathon_Bomb_Brothers.jpg" alt="" width="200" /></td>
</tr><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Tamerlan and Dzkokhar Tsarnaev</span></td>
</tr></tbody></table><p>The two carjackers did not attempt to pursue the escaped hostage. Instead they drove away in the Mercedes, heading in the direction of Watertown. Police were able to track the SUV’s movements by monitoring the carjacking victim’s cellphone that remained in the car.</p>
<p>When police caught up with the SUV on a residential street in Watertown, the men in the Mercedes threw at least two pipe bombs out of the car and shot several rounds at the seven Watertown police arriving at the scene. An intense firefight broke out. More police arrived, encircling the SUV, creating a dangerous crossfire situation. Over 200 rounds were fired by the police, including one critically wounding a transit police officer during the gunfight.</p>
<p>About 20 minutes into the firefight, one of the men in the SUV exited the car. As he fired at the police a bullet sent him to the ground. As police attempted to drag him to safety, the other man in the SUV then drove straight ahead, barely missing one of the officers but running over the body of the fallen shooter and dragging the body under the car a few yards. After that the SUV struck a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority office, seriously injuring him. Somehow the SUV threaded through the parked police cars and disappeared into the night.</p>
<p>The man on the ground was dead. From his fingerprints the police learned that he was 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a long-time immigrant from the Russian region of Dagestan who had been living in Cambridge since he was 14 years old. Police also now knew that his brother was 19-year-old Dzkokhar Tsarnaev, a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth who had become a naturalized U.S. citizen on September 11, 2012 and had lived in Cambridge since he was 7 years old. </p>
<p>Abandoning the SUV and smashing both of his cellphones, Dzkokhar searched for a place to hide. Bleeding from gunshot wounds he sustained in the firefight, he took up refuge in a 22-foot long motorboat parked in a backyard a few blocks away. There he spent the night and the following day as police from all over the metro area combed the Watertown area in a house-by-house search. State officials had put the entire metro area on lockdown Friday morning, shutting off all public transit and ordering residents to remain inside their homes until further notice. This directive was called “Shelter in Place.” One of American’s largest cities was paralyzed by the search for one teenaged terrorist.</p>
<p>Shortly after 6 p.m. on Friday, the curfew was called off and people were allowed to leave their homes. When Dave Henneberry stepped outside his Watertown house around 7 p.m. he noticed that the tarp covering his motorboat – aptly named <em>The Slip Away II</em>– was not fastened down all the way. He went to his garage and got a ladder and laid it up against the boat. Three steps up the ladder he noticed blood on one side of the deck and wondered if he had cut himself the last time he was on the boat. Then he saw blood on the other side of the deck. Looking over the rest of the boat he saw a body.</p>
<p>“I levitated off the ladder,” Henneberry said later. He returned to his house and told his wife, “Lock the doors,” before calling 911.</p>
<p><img style="float: right;" src="http://crimemagazine.com/images/boston_bombing_boat.jpg" alt="" height="183" width="276" />A massive phalanx of law enforcement converged on Henneberry’s back yard. A SWAT team with heavily armored vehicles approached the boat. At least two concussion grenades were tossed inside the boat and multiple rounds of gun shots were fired at the boat. Although Dzkokbar had made no threatening moves or even shown himself, police feared he might ignite another pressure-cooker bomb or some other explosive device. They also feared he was armed. A state police helicopter using thermal imaging technology showed where the suspect was hiding in the boat; a robotic arm attached to a police vehicle pulled the tarp back exposing the insides of the boat. After FBI negotiators made verbal contact with him, Dzkokhar surrendered without incident around 8:45 p.m. There was no gun or any explosives found in the boat. The gun Tamerlan had used at the Watertown shootout was recovered at the scene.</p>
<p><strong>“Fuck America”</strong></p>
<p>Inside the dry-docked boat, Dzkokbar, who friends would later describe as a “copious pot smoker,” had scrawled various messages during his 18 hours hiding out. “The U.S. government is killing our innocent civilians”; “I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished…We Muslims are one body, you hurt one, your hurt us all”;“Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop;” “Fuck America.” He also wrote that he did not “like killing innocent people” because “it is forbidden by Islam,” but wrote that because of what had been done to Muslims such violence “is allowed.”</p>
<p>Critically wounded, Dzkokbar was taken by ambulance to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, one of the hospitals where numerous marathon victims had been and many were still being treated. He had sustained numerous gunshot wounds to his legs and hands as well as having been shot in the mouth and head. The shot to his head fractured his skull. It also damaged his pharynx, middle ear and cervical vertebra. The bullet that struck him in the mouth exited through the left side of his lower face. Trauma Surgeon Ray Odom called that wound “A high-powered injury.” The more serious wounds had been most likely inflicted while he lay sprawled in the motorboat. It was a miracle he was still alive.</p>
<p>Dzkokbar underwent extensive surgeries on Friday night and Saturday. On Sunday a special team of interrogators was dispatched from Washington to question the prisoner. In interviewing him, the Obama administration invoked the “public safety exception” to the Miranda rule which permitted them to question him without reading him his right to remain silent or his right to have an attorney present. The interrogators wanted to determine if he had any possible connections to other Islamic extremists. Dzkokbar, who could only communicate by writing his responses because of the wound to his throat, wrote that he and his brother had acted alone – that no one else had been involved in the attacks. He also told the investigators that the bombings were masterminded by his brother and that they were motivated by their Islamic fervor and anger over the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also informed them they had learned how to make the bombs by logging onto and English-language magazine produced by an al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen called <em>Inspire</em>. The magazine inaugural issue came out in 2010 and contained bomb-making instructions in an article entitled “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”</p>
<p>At the request of his three federal public defenders, Judy Clarke, a nationally prominent death-penalty attorney from San Diego, agreed to join Dzkokbar’s legal team on April 29. In the past she has represented Susan Smith, who was convicted of drowning her two children; Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Jared Loughner, who killed six people at an event held by U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, where the congresswoman was shot in the head and grievously wounded. All of these defendants escaped the death penalty and received life sentences.</p>
<p>On the Monday after the bombings, Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler, after reading Dzkokbar his Miranda rights, charged him with using a weapon of mass destruction that resulted in three deaths and injuries to over 170 people. Three public defenders assigned to defend him were present at his bedside in ICU as were two U.S. attorneys. Earlier the White House had stated that the younger Tsarnaev could not be tried as an enemy combatant. Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said it was illegal to try an American citizen in a military tribunal. The Military Commission Act of 2009 specifically forbids military trials of U.S. citizens. An “enemy combatant” is defined as one who is a foreign national associated with al Qaida and associated groups.</p>
<p>A week later, Dzkokbar was transferred to the Federal Medical Center Devens, about 40 miles west of Boston at Ft. Devens Army base. The medical center is a mixture of high-security prison cells with hospital rooms. The men-only prison hospital houses just over a thousand inmates and about 130 others at an adjacent minimum-security camp.</p>
<p>Dzkokbar, pronounced Jo-Har, is confined to a small, one-person cell with a steel door and observation window and a slot for passing food and medicine. He is not allowed to mingle, speak or pray with other prisoners. He may leave his cell for one hour a day to go to an isolated small open space to exercise, but does so infrequently. He has no access to radio or TV, but is allowed some books and selected reading material. The newspapers and magazines he have been stripped of classified ads and letters to the editor, a precaution the government takes to prevent coded messages reaching him. The only visitors allowed are a mental health consultant, his legal team, and members of his immediate family. While members of his legal team have been to see him about every other day, his two older sisters are his only family in the Boston area and they rarely visit. His parents live in Dagestan.</p>
<p>The arraignment in federal district court in Boston on July 10, 2013, marked the first public appearance for Dzkokbar since his arrest. He had come a long way since winning a $2,500 scholarship from the City of Cambridge to attend college in 2011. At the time of the bombings, Dzkokbar owed $20,000 to the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and was failing many of his courses. His friends said he had become a “copious pot smoker,” and was dealing in dope to survive. His brother, whom he idealized, had made a worse wreck of his own life.</p>
<p>About three dozen victims and family members attended the arraignment. Dzkokbar appeared in an orange jumpsuit, his face swollen and his hand bandaged. His left forearm was in a cast. <em>The New York Times</em> reported that he seemed “drowsy or tired and he wiped his mouth and his nose several times, rubbing the back of his neck and grabbing at his jumpsuit, his curly hair flopping over his forehead.” Represented by Judy Clarke and Miriam Conrad, he pleaded not guilty to the 30 counts against him. Seventeen of the counts carry the death penalty. The hearing lasted eight minutes. As soon as it concluded, federal marshals bound his hands and led him out. As he left he smiled at his two sisters and made a kissing gesture toward them.</p>
<p>The trial, which the prosecution estimated would last up to three months, is scheduled for November of 2014. The fact that the defense has hired a mental consultant may indicate that the defense intends to put on a mental illness defense – that he was under the domination of an out-of-control older brother who took him off the deep end.</p>
<p> </p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Topics:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/topics/mass-murderers" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mass Murderers</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/topics/murder" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Murder</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Authors:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">J. Patrick O&#039;Connor</a></div></div></div>Mon, 21 Apr 2014 21:12:01 +0000admin1601 at http://www.crimemagazine.comhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/boston-marathon-bombings#commentsBook ‘Em Vol. 40http://www.crimemagazine.com/book-%E2%80%98em-vol-40
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p style="text-align: center;"><strong><em><span style="font-size: small;"><img src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51D4FM-VjSL.jpg" alt="" height="300" /></span></em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong><em><span style="font-size: small;">Crime Magazine's Choice of True Crime Books</span></em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">by <a href="http://www.crimemagazine.com/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor">J. Patrick O’Connor</a></span></p>
<!--break--><p></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/0307956458" rel="nofollow"><em><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51YKNp%2B%2BznL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="83" />Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton &amp; Aaron Burr Teamed up to Take on American’s First Sensational Murder Mystery</em></a> by Paul Collins (Crown Publishers, 2013, $26). Listeners to National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition” are familiar with Paul Collins as the “literary detective.” His eighth book is about how the bitterest of political enemies – Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton – formed the “original dream team” to defend the young man charged with murdering Elma Sands, a beautiful young Quaker woman in the final days of 1799. By the time Burr and Hamilton agreed to defend Levi Weeks, the young carpenter who had been one of Sands’s suitors, Weeks had been roundly convicted in the court of public opinion. <em>Duel with the Devil</em> is part who-done-it – the author makes his claim to solve this cold case – and a well-documented tutorial in early U.S. history, politics and the development of New York City. Just how extraordinary was it for Burr and Hamilton to collaborate? Within a year of winning Weeks’s acquittal, Burr would be elected to serve as Thomas Jefferson’s vice president, ousting the Federalist administration of John Adams, and within four years Burr would kill Hamilton in a duel.</p>
<p><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/1937163148" rel="nofollow"><em><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Y73-U-6SL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="83" />True Crime: Real Life Stories of Abduction, Addiction, Obsession, Murder, Grave-Robbing, and More</em></a>, edited by Lee Gutkind, (In Fact Books, 2013, $15.95). Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of <em>Creative Nonfiction</em> magazine. The book is a compilation of 13 true-crime stories, each well-written and provocative, covering a wide range of cases. One deals with the attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, another with the unsolved lynching of Claude Neal. David Updike chronicles the murder of a mother and her two young children in Ipswich, Massachusetts in 1973 that led to the conviction of the family’s father. In an interview, Erik Larson, the author of <em>The Devil in the White City</em> and <em>In the Garden of Beasts</em>, discusses how he makes history come to life.</p>
<p><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/1479108375" rel="nofollow"><em><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51O78pgCLRL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="83" />Pro Bono: The 18-Year Defense of Caril Ann Fugate</em></a> by Jeff McArthur (Bandwagon Books, 2012). Caril Ann Fugate became the youngest female ever charged with murder in U.S. history. In 1958, 19-year-old Charlie Starkweather went on a murder spree that paralyzed Nebraska, shocked the nation, and left 11 people dead. With him when he was captured was his 14-year-old ex-girlfriend. Caril claimed, with good reason, that she was coerced to be with him – that she was a hostage – but the prosecutor led the jury to believe what the newspapers were claiming: that she and Starkweather were a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde. In a separate trial, Starkweather was convicted. He was soon executed. At her subsequent trial, she was defended by the author’s grandfather, John McArthur. Caril was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. She maintained her innocence – a claim that delayed her eventual parole in 1976 by five years – in appeal after appeal filed pro bono by McArthur. The book explores the extraordinary relationship that developed between the defense lawyer and his infamous client and brings out details that shed light on a case that was anything but open and shut.</p>
<p><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/0345802985" rel="nofollow"><em><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51D4FM-VjSL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="96" />The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries</em></a> edited by Otto Penzler (Vintage Books, 2013, $25). Big it is at 647 pages. Otto Penzler is a two-time Edgar Award winner and the editor of numerous anthologies, including the <em>Big Book of Ghost Stories</em>. He is the owner of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. The anthology includes Christmas themed mysteries by Agatha Christie, Isaac Asimov, C.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conon Doyle, Ellery Queen, Damon Runyon, Erle Stanley Gardner and a Who’s Who of mystery writers from the last 100 years.</p>
<p><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/0882823949" rel="nofollow"><em><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41HeR5hYocL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="86" />The Spin Doctor</em></a> by Kirk Mitchell (New Horizon Press, 2013, $24.95). Kurt Sonnenfeld, a videographer for FEMA, gained notoriety for claiming that the footage he shot at Ground Zero following the 9/11 attacks at the Twin Towers proved that the U.S. government orchestrated the attacks to justify the Iraq war. The following year, when he was charged with murdering his wife, 36-year-old Nancy Sonnenfeld, in the couple’s Denver home, he said she committed suicide over their distressed marriage and that the murder charge was meant to silence him about his 9/11 claims. When Sonnenfeld was later released for lack of evidence, he fled to Argentina. After Denver authorities reinstated an arrest warrant for Sonnenfeld and sought his extradition, the government in Argentina refused to extradite him. Kirk Mitchell, a reporter for <em>The Denver Post</em> for 25 years, spent three years researching the case and makes a compelling case for Sonnenfeld’s guilt.</p>
<p><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/B0096DZUHA" rel="nofollow"><em><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/510PQRYGVWL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="76" />The Boston Stranglers</em></a> by Susan Kelly (Pinnacle, 2013, $7.99). An update of her 1996 book that includes new DNA evidence that confirms that Albert DeSalvo was not The Boston Strangler. Well-researched and well-written, the book shows DeSalvo to be a pathological liar who confessed to being a serial killer to sate his craving for celebrity status. Short documents that no physical or circumstantial evidence, nor any eyewitness testimony, ever existed to connect DeSalvo to any of the murders attributed to The Boston Strangler. She establishes through profiling that more than one killer had to be involved. None of the 13 murders attributed to the Strangler have ever been solved and remain “unsolved homicides.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/1483955559" rel="nofollow"><em><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51CVV-jfRtL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="83" /></em></a></p>
<p><em><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/1483955559" rel="nofollow"><em>Vegas and the Mob: Forty Years of Frenzy</em></a></em><em> by Al W. Moe (Self-Published, 2013). The author is a Nevada casino historian. By the 1950s, nearly every crime family in the United States had a stake in a Las Vegas casino. <em>Vegas and the Mob</em> traces how the Mafia turned a sleepy gambling oasis into the gambling capital of the world – with Sinatra and Howard Hughes playing their parts. Also how the mob skimmed so much money off the top that by the 1970s the Flamingo, Sands, Dunes, Tropicana and the Riviera were all falling into disrepair. In its greed, the mob was killing the Golden Goose.</em></p>
<p><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/B00AYLEQQO" rel="nofollow"><em><img style="float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41q83euh4jL._SL125_.jpg" alt="" height="125" width="75" /></em></a><a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/B00AYLEQQO" rel="nofollow"><em>Joey “The Needle”</em></a> by Ronald Sales (Self-Published, 2013 Kindle Edition only). The story of how the author, aka Joey “The Needle,” was a major player in one of the largest international anabolic steroid smuggling rings.</p>
<p> </p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Topics:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/topics/crime-books-and-films" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Crime Books and Films</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Authors:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">J. Patrick O&#039;Connor</a></div></div></div>Mon, 11 Nov 2013 19:10:01 +0000admin1454 at http://www.crimemagazine.comhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/book-%E2%80%98em-vol-40#commentsThe Brussels Airport Diamond Heisthttp://www.crimemagazine.com/brussels-airport-diamond-heist
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #ff0000;">Updated May 8, 2013</span><br /></span></p>
<p><em><img style="vertical-align: middle; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://crimemagazine.com/images/belgium_diamond_heist.jpg" alt="" width="380" /></em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Helvetic Airways aircraft at the Brussels international airport (Photo: Associated Press)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em>In a daring, commado-style operation, eight masked, heavily armed gunmen pulled off a lightening quick heist of more than $50 million worth of diamonds. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #ff0000;">Update: May 8, 2013</span> Nearly three months after the spectacularly daring diamond heist at Brussels Airport, authorities announced on May 8, 2013 that at least 31 people – spread out over France, Switzerland and Belgium – have been detained in connection with the estimated $50 million theft.</p>
<p>The Associated Press reported that a Frenchman, who is believed to have been one of the airport robbers, was arrested in France, while eight people, including a lawyer, were detained in Geneva, and 24 in and around Brussels.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">“In Switzerland, we have found diamonds that we can say are coming from the heist, and in Belgium large amounts of money have been found. And the investigation is ongoing,” said Jean-Marc Meilleur, spokesperson for the Brussels prosecutor’s office. In Geneva, a police statement said “a very important quantity of diamonds was seized” during the roundup of suspects. </p>
<p style="text-align: left;">A Swiss investigator told reporters that almost a third of the stolen diamonds were seized in the Geneva raids and that about $110,000 in cash and a number of luxury cars were also confiscated. The unnamed investigator said all eight of those detained in Geneva were middlemen and intermediaries involved in the cutting and selling of the stolen diamonds.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">by <a href="http://www.crimemagazine.com/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor">J. Patrick O’Connor</a></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: x-large;">F</span>or centuries, Antwerp has been the world’s center of diamond trading and remains so today. According to a spokesperson for the Antwerp World Diamond Centre about $200 million in diamonds enter and leave Antwerp daily, with about 99 percent of that moving through the Brussels Airport in several shipments each week. The spokesperson said that diamonds traded in Antwerp last year had a total value of $51.9 billion, accounting for 80 percent of the world’s rough diamond trade and 50 percent of trade in polished stones. The only other major diamond center is Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.</p>
<p>Diamond brokers from around the world store their diamonds and gems – sometimes for as little as a day – in one or more of the 160 safety-deposit boxes located in an underground vault at the Antwerp Diamond Centre. Once a deal is brokered for the sale of the diamonds, shipment is arranged through the Zaventem International Airport in Brussels. The diamonds are placed in small packets and driven by armored Brinks vans to the airport. On the 25-mile trip to the airport, the Brinks vans are accompanied by armed escorts that peel away once the Brinks vans arrive at the airport’s locked gate.</p>
<p>On the evening of February 18, 2013, eight heavily armed masked men were outfitted in airport security uniforms and drove two black vehicles that had police-style lights on top. They arrived at Zaventem International Airport in Brussels in darkness intent on pulling off the most audacious heist in airport history. They knew, due to construction near the main security gate, that gate would be unlocked. Using wire cutters, they opened a section of the other 10-foot-high security fence on the perimeter of the airport and then waited eight minutes for the Brinks van to unload some 125 packets of diamonds in the cargo hold of Flight LX789, a Helvetic Airways jet waiting to depart in the next 18 minutes for Zurich, Switzerland.</p>
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</ul>Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:12:54 +0000admin944 at http://www.crimemagazine.comhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/brussels-airport-diamond-heist#commentsMass Murder in Newtown and the Battle Over Assault Weaponshttp://www.crimemagazine.com/mass-murder-newtown-and-battle-over-assault-weapons
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #ff0000;">Revised April 8, 2013</span><br /></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://crimemagazine.com/images/newtown_shooting.jpg" alt="newtown shooting" height="293" width="440" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em>A month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, President Obama called for sweeping legislation to stem “the epidemic of violence” confronting the United States. The next day, the National Rifle Association called the President’s proposal to rein in gun violence “the fight of the century.” No new federal legislation would result from the Sandy Hook massacre.</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">by <a href="http://crimemagazine.com/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" rel="nofollow">J. Patrick O’Connor</a></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span>n 2012, the Newtown, Connecticut massacre capped the worst year in U.S. history for mass murderers using high-capacity ammunition clips in assault weapons. Fifty innocent people were gunned down in public places. In April, seven people at Oikos University in Oakland, California were shot to death; in July, 12 people, including a 6-year-old girl, were murdered at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado where another 58 people sustained gunshot wounds; in August, five men and one woman were shot to death at a Sikh Temple outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Three others, including a police officer, suffered gunshot wounds.</p>
<p>All the children murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, were first graders. Seventeen of them were 6 years old and three had recently turned 7. If police and other first responders had not arrived as swiftly as they had, dozens if not scores more of children would have been shot to death. The shooter, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, had several hundred unspent bullets in additional ammunition clips. Instead of committing the second deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history – second only to the 32 people shot to death at Virginia Tech in 2007 – he would have committed the worst. The Hartford <em>Courant </em>reported that Lanza had several news articles in his bedroom about Andres Behring Breivik murdering 77 people, most of whom were teenagers, in Norway in 2011. It is likely his intent was to top that body count.</p>
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</ul>Mon, 21 Jan 2013 21:07:13 +0000admin776 at http://www.crimemagazine.comhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/mass-murder-newtown-and-battle-over-assault-weapons#commentsOther Voices TV: Executing Justicehttp://www.crimemagazine.com/other-voices-tv-executing-justice
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><iframe style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/36450284" frameborder="0" height="375" width="500"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/36450284" rel="nofollow">Other Voices TV: Executing Justice</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/ppjcvideos" rel="nofollow">PPJC Videos</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com" rel="nofollow">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p class="first">A conversation with J. Patrick O'Connor author of <a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crimemagazi0b-20/detail/0984233377" rel="nofollow">SCAPEGOAT: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper.</a></p>
<p>Kevin Cooper was convicted of the brutal murders of a Chino Hills, California family and a young houseguest in 1985 and has been on death row at San Quentin since then. O'Connor shows how the sheriff's office and the district attorney's office of San Bernardino County framed Cooper for these horrific murders and how the justice system has failed him at almost every turn in his long, drawn-out appeal process. If it were not for a court-ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal injection controversy, Cooper – with no appeals remaining – would have been executed by now. It is expected the moratorium will be lifted in 2013. If it is, Cooper would be fifth in line for execution of the more than 700 people on Death Row in California.</p>
<p>O'Connor provides a rare direct examination of the broken justice system in the United States where homicide detectives and district attorneys all too often become blinded by their goal of winning convictions rather than searching for justice for both the victims and the accused. The Kevin Cooper case, as Judge William Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has written, is a prime example of justice gone begging.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Topics:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/capital-punishment" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Capital Punishment</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/justice-issues" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Justice Issues</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Authors:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">J. Patrick O&#039;Connor</a></div></div></div>Wed, 28 Nov 2012 21:19:44 +0000admin607 at http://www.crimemagazine.comhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/other-voices-tv-executing-justice#commentsOur Broken Justice Systemhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/our-broken-justice-system
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://crimemagazine.com/images/slave ship 4.jpg" alt="Prison Overcrowding" height="250" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em>This essay is adapted from a presentation J. Patrick O’Connor gave at the Collier County, Florida, Main Library on October 16, 2012. <br /></em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">by <a href="http://crimemagazine.com/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" rel="nofollow">J. Patrick O’Connor </a></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he United States operates the largest criminal justice system in the world, incarcerating 2.3 million people in over 5,000 jails and prisons. Another five million Americans are on parole or some sort of conditional release program. Since the so-called “War on Drugs” was launched during the Reagan administration in the early 1980s along with mandatory sentencing guidelines for drug possession and sales, our prison population has nearly tripled. Over 50 percent of the people now incarcerated are in on drug offenses, thousands of them for marijuana possession.</p>
<p>Although the U.S. makes up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, we now incarcerate 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Russia is a distant second. The U.S. justice system now imprisons its citizens at a rate roughly five to 10 times higher than the countries of Western Europe. It isn’t because U.S. citizens are five to 10 times more inclined to commit crimes than Europeans, it’s because our state legislatures have enacted a host of mandatory minimum sentences enhancements that took sentencing discretion out of the hands of judges and juries and placed it in the hands of “get tough on crime” prosecutors. Over the last 15 years, these “enhancements” have doubled the average prison sentence for a wide variety of offenses. In terms of incarcerating youth, the disparity is far more pronounced. The United States incarcerates 336 per 100,000 youths. Austria incarcerates 25, Germany 23, Italy 11 and Japan 0.1. The second highest incarceration for youth in the world is 69 out of 100,000 in South Africa.</p>
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<p>Our justice system is broken in many ways. The great disparity in sentencing for crack cocaine possession and sales compared to powdered cocaine is one egregious example. Such a disparity speaks directly to the bias in the justice system against blacks. A Pew Center Research report published in 2008 showed that blacks comprise 62.7 percent and whites 36.7 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons, despite the fact that other data show “clearly that this racial disparity bears scant relation to racial differences in drug offending. There are, for example, five times more white drug users than black. Relative to population, black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men.”</p>
<p>The research showed that in seven states, blacks constitute between 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison</p>
<p>Another monumental failure in our justice system is the fact that almost all of our prisons have turned into warehouses rather than places of rehabilitation – despite the fact that 90 percent of all those incarcerated now will be released. This lack of rehabilitation has led us to the highest recidivism rate in our penal history. While over the last 25 years we have experienced the greatest growth in prison construction in our national history – during a period when crime rates across the country have nearly fallen by half – we’ve drastically cut down expenditures for parole officers and drug treatment programs both inside and outside prison. The primary driving force behind today’s prison industrial complex is prison guard unions. They exert more control over the trajectory of prison expansion and prison operations than any other government entity. It is to their benefit that mandatory sentencing laws have drastically increased the amount of time served and that the recidivism rate remains high. </p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>The Tip of the Iceberg: Exonerations</strong></p>
<p>Another way – among many others – to gauge the problem with our justice system is to look at the rapidly increasing number of exonerations occurring throughout the United States over the last two decades or so. </p>
<p>On TV, an exoneration looks like a singular victory for a defendant and his or her appeal attorney but there’s usually someone to blame for the underlying tragedy, often more than one person. The common culprits include the defendant’s trial attorneys – most often public defenders or court-appointed attorneys – as well as police officers, prosecutors and judges.</p>
<p>Since 1989, more than 2,000 people convicted of serious crimes such as murder and sexual assault have been exonerated. Those innocent people spent an average of 17 years behind bars for crimes they did not commit.</p>
<p>Another 1,170 additional convicted felons had their convictions thrown out starting in 1995 amid the periodic exposures of 13 major police scandals around the country. In all those cases, police officers fabricated crimes, usually by planting drugs or guns on innocent defendants. The Philadelphia Police Department was notorious for this. Crime labs – most notably those in Houston, Texas and North Carolina, often abetted these false convictions with fudged forensic evidence.</p>
<p>There is no official record keeping for exonerations. In May of 2012, the University of Michigan Law School and the Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law published a comprehensive study about exonerations, covering the last 23 years – since 1989.</p>
<p>The study contains detailed information on 873 of the 2,000 exonerations. Nine out 10 of the exonerated were men, and half of those were African-American. One half of the exonerations were homicide cases and 101 of those resulted in the death sentence. This by itself is a powerful argument against the death penalty. (Thirty-seven states still use executions as the ultimate punishment. California voters turned down an initiative to ban the death penalty on November 6, 2012.) Over one-third of the 873 exonerations closely studied were for sexual assault.</p>
<p>Although DNA exonerations are the ones most highly publicized, some 85 percent of exonerations come about the old fashion way without the benefit of DNA evidence. These convictions are overturned by shoe letter, by defense attorneys and investigators or by Innocence Projects gathering evidence that establishes innocence such as proving perjured testimony, by exposing prosecutorial abuses such as withholding evidence from the defense attorney that established the accused person’s innocence, debunking eye witness testimony, or by showing crime lab incompetence or outright malfeasance.</p>
<p>The Michigan/Northwestern study found it particularly odd – as in not credible – that two of the largest counties in the United States – San Bernardino County in California and Bexar County in Texas, home to San Antonio – had no exonerations.</p>
<p>In one-half of the 873 exonerations closely examined the most common factor leading to false convictions was perjured testimony. Prosecutors often cut deals with inmates or those under possible indictment to testify for the state. Despite “snitch” testimony being the most unreliable to present to a jury, prosecutors routinely resort to this tactic to obtain convictions when real evidence of guilt is lacking.</p>
<p>Another major contributor to false convictions was mistaken eyewitness identification. Some 24 percent of the wrongful convictions involved false or misleading forensic evidence. One of the greatest problems in the U.S. justice system is crime labs being a part of the police or sheriff’s department.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>The Kevin Cooper Case</strong></p>
<p>To illustrate how broken our justice system can be, I’m going to focus on one capital case from San Bernardino County about which my book: <em>Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper</em>, is based.</p>
<p>Kevin Cooper, who was 27 at the time, was convicted in 1985 of the brutal Chino Hills murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 11-year-old houseguest, Christopher Hughes, and the attempted murder of the Ryens’ 8 1/2 –year-old son, Joshua. </p>
<p>Not since the Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969, had California law enforcement been called to a more grisly crime scene than when the Ryen/Hughes murders were discovered on June 5, 1983. All the victims were murdered in the Ryens’ master bedroom around midnight. There was an uncommon viciousness to the attack as though the killers meant not only to murder but to send a message of payback or retribution. The murdering of children is highly suggestive of this.</p>
<p>The medical examiner counted 144 wounds on the four murder victims, including 28 fractures and two amputations. The murders were committed with at least three, and probably four, weapons: a hatchet, an ice pick and one or two hunting type knives.</p>
<p>Miraculously, 8-year-old Josh Ryen survived the attack despite being left for dead with his throat slashed ear to ear, a hatchet blow to his head that fractured his skull, several stab wounds to his back that broke three of his ribs and collapsed one lung, broke his collarbone and nearly severed his left ear.</p>
<p>Two days before the murders, Kevin Cooper had escaped from a nearby prison. He had recently been sentenced to four years in prison for two separate burglaries in Los Angeles. For the next two days he holed up in a vacant house 125 yards below the Ryens’ hilltop house in Arabian horse country. Three hours before the murders, Cooper began hitchhiking to the Tijuana border, arriving there just after midnight. </p>
<p>Around midnight that night a couple, attempting to exit a driveway on the only road that led away from the Ryens’ house, saw three young white men driving rapidly down that road in a station wagon that was stolen from the murdered family. </p>
<p>The only survivor of the attack, young Josh, communicated to ER personnel and a sheriff’s deputy that his assailants were three white men. Cooper is black.</p>
<p>Shortly after midnight the night of the murders, three, young white men entered a bar and grill about a mile from the Ryens’ house. Numerous bar workers and patrons observed them to be extremely drunk or spaced out on drugs. When two of the men approached three young, attractive women, one of the women, a phlebotomist – a person who draws blood – told him he had blood splatter all over him. He had blood on his face and on his T-shirt. She noticed the other man had blood on his coveralls.</p>
<p>The day after the murders were discovered, a woman driver spotted a bloody blue T-shirt on the side of the road across from the bar and grill. A sheriff’s deputy picked it up. The next day a bloody tan T-shirt was found on the other side of the road up from the bar and grill. The tan T-shirt was a Fruit-of-the-Loom, size medium with a pocket on the front. The presence of two bloody T-shirts strongly indicated that at least two assailants were involved in the attack at the Ryen home and they were very likely the men seen in the bar with blood splatter on their clothing.</p>
<p>Four days after the murders, another woman turned into the sheriff’s office bloody coveralls her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, had left on the floor of her closet hours after the Ryens and Chris Hughes were murdered. The woman told the deputy who bagged the coveralls that she had other information that implicated her boyfriend, Eugene “Lee” Furrow, in the Chino Hills murders but she wanted to speak with homicide detectives. She would have told them that Furrow’s hatchet was missing and that he no longer had on the tan T-shirt he wore the Saturday of the murders. She knew it was a Fruit-of-the-Loom size medium with a pocket on the front. She knew this because she had recently purchased it for him at K-Mart.</p>
<p>For all intents and purposes, the case should have been solved that day, but this was the day the sheriff named Kevin Cooper as the lone assailant and set off the largest manhunt in California history to capture him. Once the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department established that Cooper had holed up in the vacant house, it locked in on him as the lone assailant despite the eyewitness reports about the three white men. From that day forward, four days after the murders were discovered, the sheriff’s department discarded information that pointed to other perpetrators, destroyed evidence that excluded Cooper, and planted or fabricated evidence that implicated him.</p>
<p>It didn’t matter to the sheriff’s department that Josh said his assailants were three white men, that a couple exiting a driveway leading away from the Ryens’ house saw three white men driving the Ryens’ station wagon, that bar workers and patrons saw three white men acting bizarrely, that two bloody T-shirts had been found outside the bar, or that a woman turned in bloody coveralls that had horse hair adhered to the pant legs. Cooper, the escaped convict and now fugitive, was going down.</p>
<p>No homicide detective would ever call on the woman who turned in the bloody coveralls. In fact, the sheriff’s office destroyed the bloody coveralls six months later on the day Cooper’s preliminary hearing began. The bloody blue T-shirt would disappear and the defense would not even learn of it until 19 years later.</p>
<p>What made me accept this case more than anything was the impossibility of one person committing these terrible crimes. The fact that three or four weapons were used overwhelmingly indicated multiple assailants. And then there were the Ryen adults themselves. Both were fit, 41-year-old chiropractors. Doug was 6 feet 2 and weighed 190 pounds and had been an MP in the U.S. Marine Corps. Peggy, the mother, was 5 foot 8 and weighed 148 pounds. She was the one who trained the enormous Arabian horses the family raised. Unassisted, she could throw large bales of hay into the back of her pickup truck. Both parents kept loaded weapons in the master bedroom where the entire attack took place. </p>
<p>We know from the medical examiner’s report that Doug Ryen made it, on foot, back and forth from his side of the bed to his wife’s side. We know that the daughter, Jessica, made it outside the house during the attack and was brought back in before her mother was murdered. The medical examiner said that blood from Peggy Ryen had dripped onto Jessica as though the mother had been cradling her daughter. If there had been only one assailant, Mrs. Ryen would have shot him dead instead of dying five feet from where her Luger pistol sat in the top drawer of her bedside table.</p>
<p>In writing this book my main purpose was to create a record of just how this particular framing took place, about how an innocent man was convicted of crimes he had no agency in. Kevin Cooper’s case offers a microcosm of our broken justice system. Our justice system is far too often a system where homicide detectives and district attorneys become blinded by their goal of closing cases – particularly such high profile cases as the Chino Hills murders.</p>
<p>The notion that every police department and every district attorney’s office have one or two rotten apples and that explains why every once in a while we convict the wrong person and set the real perpetrator free is simply not a valid explanation. I’d rather compare it to the notion that if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a thoroughly corrupt police department – and a complicit D.A.’s Office – to frame an innocent person. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department was – and had been for years – infected with a culture of corruption.</p>
<p>The terrible thing about corrupt police departments is the power and resources they have to hang crimes on innocent people, particularly indigent, minority defendants who do not have the resources to fight back effectively.</p>
<p>As such, our justice system is inherently unfair and always has been. As Clarence Darrow told a group of inmates at a Chicago jail over a hundred years ago, “…the courts are not instruments of justice. When your case gets into court it will make little difference whether you are guilty or innocent, but it’s better if you have a smart lawyer. And you cannot have a smart lawyer unless you have money. First and last, it’s a question of money…We have no system for doing justice, not the slightest in the world.”</p>
<p>Darrow said that <em>if</em> the courts were organized to promote justice “the people would elect somebody to defend all these criminals, somebody as smart as the prosecutors – and give him as many detectives and as many assistants to help, and pay as much money to defend you.”</p>
<p>One of the great myths about our justice system is the presumption of innocence. From the indictment onward, the public presumption, overwhelming so, is one of guilt. Almost all pre-trial publicity presents the prosecution’s side of the case, including many patently false accusations about the accused. In the San Bernardino case, the sheriff reported that Cooper had made a phone call from the murdered family’s house – a blatant lie.</p>
<p>Cooper’s trial had the trappings of fairness, but was lost long before the trial opened. Two pre-trial developments caused this outcome: The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department destroyed evidence that could have exonerated Kevin, and his public defender insisted on going it alone. Not many Davids actually slay Goliaths.</p>
<p>Only two blacks sat on the jury that convicted him and sentenced him to die.</p>
<p>Pre-trial, Cooper was demonized by the police. He was depicted as some sort of crazed, maniacal super-predator. While he evaded capture for eight weeks, he was characterized as possessing Houdini-like escape skills and as a homosexual who was a cross-dresser and liked to associate with transvestites.</p>
<p>Once he was convicted and sentenced to die, Cooper then entered a protracted appeal process. During the appeal process, the tables are flipped. The convicted is presumed guilty and the burden of proof to prove otherwise is now his or hers alone. With a series of court-appointed attorneys giving lip service to his appeals, Cooper was within months of being executed in San Quentin’s death chamber when one of the largest international law firms in San Francisco, Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, took on his appeal pro bono. </p>
<p>On the day of his schedule execution, February 10, 2004, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay of execution and granted Cooper a new habeas corpus hearing.</p>
<p>Cooper had several constitutional claims that merited habeas corpus relief but came up against a federal district judge, Marilyn Huff, who refused to follow the law. The law, as Mumia Abu-Jamal said in his book <em>Jailhouse Lawyers</em>, is only what a judge says it is. Cooper’s case proves the shameful truth of that.</p>
<p>Judge Huff’s flouting of the law during Cooper’s habeas corpus proceedings caused Orrick lawyers to petition the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for a new habeas hearing. When the en banc court narrowly denied the request in 2009, one of the Ninth’s judges released a 103-page dissent that began with these words, “The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man.” In addition to Judge William Fletcher, 10 other judges signed or wrote separate dissents in support of Cooper being granted a new habeas corpus proceeding in Federal District Court. </p>
<p>At Gonzaga University School of Law in 2010, Judge Fletcher delivered a lecture of the subject of the death penalty, holding that the problem with the administration of it are widespread and endemic rather than merely regional or local. To illustrate he cited the Kevin Cooper case, stating, “The case I am about to describe is horrible in many ways. The murders were horrible. Kevin Cooper, the man now sitting on death row, may well be – and in my view probably is – innocent. And he is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed him.”</p>
<p>Judge Fletcher, a Rhodes Scholar who attended Oxford University, said what happened in the Cooper case “is a familiar story. It is by no means the usual story. But it happens often enough to be familiar. The police are under heavy pressure to solve a high profile crime. They know, or think they know, who did the crime. And they plant evidence to help their case along.”</p>
<p>As a result, Kevin Cooper has now spent over half of his life in prison for a crime he had nothing to do with. His case, and thousands similar to it, show just how broken our justice system is. </p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Topics:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/justice-issues" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Justice Issues</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Authors:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/authors/j-patrick-oconnor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">J. Patrick O&#039;Connor</a></div></div></div>Wed, 28 Nov 2012 21:06:28 +0000admin606 at http://www.crimemagazine.comhttp://www.crimemagazine.com/our-broken-justice-system#comments